He was born in 1833, in the night of the historical meteoric display--the "star-shower," he always called it. His father was a famous actor in the parts which the son so often played. I never saw the elder, but others assured me he possessed a tragic genius perhaps at times even more tremendous than that of the Booth I knew. He was an Englishman, and the rival of Edmund Kean. The family tradition is that he was driven from London by a cabal of Kean's admirers, and came to America in 1821, almost immediately after his marriage. Junius Brutus Booth must have been an extraordinary person off the stage; erratic almost to insanity, gloomy, given to fits of passion, but full of warm affections; a man with a temper almost uncontrollable, yet more often morose than violent, who refused to play, even when announced, unless he was in the vein, and walked the streets for hours after acting, and sometimes before. His wife for years accompanied him to the theatre, acting as dresser, and Edwin was taken with them. He thus received his first impressions of the stage when he was three or four years old. The wife remained in the dressing-room during the play, and when the child grew sleepy he was put to bed in a chest of drawers that held his father's wardrobe. If he wakened he had the theatrical wigs and paint-pots for his toys. A few years later he took his mother's place and dressed his father for the stage. [Illustration: _From photo by F. Gutekunst._ _Copyright by F. Gutekunst, Philadelphia._] There were several children, and three of the sons became actors. I asked him whether he was the favorite, but he said no: his father always preferred John Wilkes. Yet Edwin had the greatest influence with the tragedian when the gloomy fits came on, and followed him many a night through the streets to see that he got no harm. He could prevail on him to act when no other could, and often told me of his attempts to direct their wanderings so that they might reach the stage-door in time. He himself was melancholy and moody, and lived very much in the imagination. It must have been a strange spectacle--this erratic genius and his anxious child, both slightly formed, with the same wonderful piercing eyes, stumbling about the streets at dark, the boy trying to persuade the father, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing altogether. The story of Edwin's first appearance on any stage has often been told. It was as Tressel to his father's Richard III. He was not yet sixteen and received no encouragement nor sign of approval from his strangely constituted parent, but a little later the two were walking in Broadway, when they met a Mr. Conway, an English actor well known to play-goers of the last generation. Booth stopped to talk, and Conway, who was pompous in speech, inquired rather elaborately: "Upon which of your sons do you intend to confer your mantle?"