If wandering stars came along, Forrest or Booth, “Jim Crow” Rice or Lotta, they were supported by his company clothed from his wardrobe, with properties from his own storehouse and with the primitive stock-scenery which had been seen in a hundred other plays. The manners and customs of those distant days are preserved for us in the autobiographies of Anna Cora Mowatt, of Joseph Jefferson, and of Clara Morris. More often than not, the manager was himself an actor, Burton or Wallack appearing now and again on his own stage; and his wife was not infrequently the leading lady. Sometimes the manager was a playwright, William Dunlap or Augustin Daly; and then he found his profit in presenting his own pieces. Sometimes he had been recruited from some other calling, R. M. Field or A. M. Palmer; but always was he devoted to the drama, thoroughly familiar with the traditions of the stage, and thoroughly enjoying his association with the theater. He was a local institution; and sometimes, Caldwell in New Orleans or Rice in Chicago, he was one of the leading citizens of the town. When a popular minstrel-company wanted the theater for a week or two, the manager was sometimes obliging enough to send his company to play in a smaller city if its “opera-house” chanced to be unoccupied. He did this more willingly when a glittering spectacle, the ‘Black Crook’ or the ‘Twelve Temptations’ asked him to turn out; but this complaisance hastened his downfall, since his well-worn scenery had a pallid look after the effulgent splendor of the interloper. Then, after a while, one and another of the more prominent stars (Joseph Jefferson, first of all, as he confesses in his autobiography), dissatisfied with the inadequacy of the mounting of their plays and disgusted by the carelessness and incompetence with which they were only too often supported by the stock-actors, began to engage companies of their own, with all the performers specially chosen for the characters they were to impersonate; they arranged to carry with them the special scenery required by the plays they intended to present that season. Soon there were so many of these, that at least one theater in each of the larger cities gave up its own company and relied exclusively upon these combinations, as the travelling companies were then called.