struggle, in which the odds were all against him, and in 1821 sailed for
America. He won an instant success, and was a great popular favorite
until the day of his death. He was a short, spare, muscular man, with a
pale countenance, set off by dark hair and lighted by a pair of piercing
blue eyes, and he possessed a voice of wonderful compass and thrilling
power. Upon the stage he was formidable and tremendous, giving an
impression of overwhelming power, in which his son, perhaps, never quite
equalled him.

Shortly after his arrival in America, Booth bought a farm near
Baltimore, and there, on November 13, 1833, Edwin Booth was born. There
was a great shower of meteors that night, which, if they portended
nothing else, may be taken as symbolical of the career of America's
greatest tragedian. He was the seventh of ten children, all of whom
inherited, in some degree, their father's genius. It was not without a
trace of madness, and reached a fearful culmination in John Wilkes
Booth, when he shot down Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in
Washington.

From the first, Edwin Booth felt himself destined for the stage. His
father did not encourage him, but finally, in 1849, consented to his
appearance with him in the unimportant part of Tressel, in "King Richard
the Third." From that time on, he accompanied his father in all his
wanderings, and partook of the strange and sad adventures of that
wayward man of genius. In 1852, he went with his father to California,
and was left there by the elder Booth, who no doubt thought it the best
school for the boy's budding talent. There, in the Sandwich Islands, and
in Australia, among the rough crowds of the mining camps, he had four
years of the most severe training that hardship, discipline, and stern
reality can furnish. Amid it all his genius grew and deepened, and when
he returned again to the east in 1856 he was no longer a novice, but an
accomplished actor.

His last years in California had been shadowed by a great sorrow--the
sudden and pitiful death of his father. The elder Booth had for years
been subject to attacks of insanity, brought on, or at least
intensified, by extreme intemperance. On one occasion he had attempted
to commit suicide. On another, he had had his nose broken, an accident
which so interfered with his voice that he did not regain complete
control of it for nearly two years. On his return from California, where
he had left his son, he stopped at New Orlean