_Vagabond Adventures_ is too good, in its way, to be forgotten so soon, was a man of decided mark as a journalist. He went to Cuba in 1873 as special correspondent of the New York _Tribune_, and suddenly and absolutely disappeared. He is supposed to have been murdered and thrown into the sea. [Illustration: P. T. BARNUM.] Lynch, when Keeler first knew him, had declined into the fat and slippered end man, too gross to dance, who ordinarily played the tambourine and the banjo, but who could, and not infrequently did, perform everything in the orchestra, from a solo on the penny trumpet to an obligato on the double-bass. He had been associated as a boy, in 1839 or 1840, under Barnum's management, with "Jack" Diamond, who was "the best representative of Ethiopian break-downs" in his day, and, according to P. T. Barnum, the prototype of the many performers of that sort who have entertained the public ever since. Lynch asserted that he and Barnum had appeared together in black faces; and Mr. Barnum, in his _Autobiography_, called Mr. Lynch "an orphan vagabond" whom he had picked up on the road; neither statement seeming to be entirely true. Lynch was his own worst enemy, and, like so many of his kind, he died in poverty and obscurity, his most perfect "break-down" being his own! It is a melancholy fact that George Holland joined Christy and Wood's minstrels in 1857, playing female characters in a blackened face, and dividing with George Christy the honors of a short season. He returned to Wallack's Theatre in 1858. This is a page in dramatic history which old play-goers do not like to read. The name of John B. Gough, the temperance orator, occurs occasionally in the reminiscences of old minstrels. He certainly did appear upon the stage as a comic singer in New York and elsewhere during his early and dissipated youth, and even gave exhibitions of ventriloquism and the like in low bar-rooms for the sake of the few pennies he could gather to keep himself in liquor, as he himself describes; but there is no hint in his _Autobiography_ of his ever having appeared in a blackened face, and his theatrical life, if it may be so called, was very short. Joseph Jefferson, the third and present bearer of that honored name, was unquestionably the youngest actor who ever made his mark with a piece of burnt cork. The story of his first appearance is told by William Winter in his volume entitled _The Jeffersons_. Coming from a family of actors, the boy, as was natural, was reared amid theatrical surroundings, and when only four years of age--in 1833--he was brought upon the stage by Thomas D. Rice himself, on a benefit occasion at the Washington Theatre. Little Joe, blackened and arrayed precisely like his senior, was carried onto the stage in a bag upon the shoulders of the shambling Ethiopian, and emptied from it with the appropriate couplet, "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd have you for to know I's got a little darky here to jump Jim Crow."