Jefferson has memories of a boyhood that was passed in Washington, Baltimore, and New York. He went to Chicago in 1838, when that place was scarcely more than a village--making the journey from New York to Buffalo in a canal-boat, and sailing thence, aboard a steamer, through the lakes of Erie, Huron, and Michigan. He travelled with his parents, and they gave dramatic performances, in which he assisted, in western towns. It was a time of poverty and hardship, but those ills were borne cheerfully--the brighter side of a hard life being kept steadily in view, and every comic incident of it being seen and appreciated. His father was a gentleman of the Mark Tapley temperament, who came out strong amid adverse circumstances, and the early disappearance from the book of that delightful person (who died in 1842, of yellow fever, at Mobile), is a positive sorrow. His mother, a refined and gentle lady, of steadfast character and of uncommon musical and dramatic talents and accomplishments, survived till 1849, and her ashes rest in Ronaldson's cemetery, in Philadelphia. Jefferson might have said much more about his parents, and especially about his famous grandfather, without risk of becoming tedious--for they were remarkably interesting people; but he was writing his own life and not theirs, and he has explained that he likes not to dwell much upon domestic matters. The story of his long ancestry of actors, which reaches back to the days of Garrick (for there have been five generations of the Jeffersons upon the stage), he has not mentioned; and the story of his own young days is hurried rapidly to a conclusion. He was brought on the stage, when a child, at the theatre in Washington, D.C., by the negro comedian Thomas D. Rice, who emptied him out of a bag; and thereupon, being dressed as "a nigger dancer," in imitation of Rice, he performed the antics of Jim Crow. He adverts to his first appearance in New York and remembers his stage combat with Master Titus; and he thinks that Master Titus must remember it also,--since one of that boy's big toes was nearly cut off in the fray. That combat occurred at the Franklin theatre, September 30, 1837--a useful fact that the autobiographer cares not to mention. He speedily becomes a young man, as the reader follows him through the first three chapters of his narrative,--of which there are seventeen,--and he is found to be acting, as a stock player, in support of James W. Wallack, Junius Brutus Booth, W.C. Macready, and Mr. and Mrs. J.W. Wallack, Jr. Upon the powers and peculiarities of those actors, and upon the traits of many others who, like them, are dead and gone (for there is scarcely a word in the book about any of his living contemporaries), he comments freely and instructively. He was "barn-storming" in Texas when the Mexican war began, and he followed in the track of the American army, and acted in the old Spanish theatre in Matamoras, in the spring of 1846; and, subsequently, finding that this did no good, he opened a stall there for the sale of coffee and other refreshments, in the corner of a gambling hell. He calls to mind the way of domestic life and the every-day aspect of houses, gardens, people, and manners in Matamoras, and those he describes with especial skill--deftly introducing the portraiture of a dusky, black-eyed, volatile Mexican girl, to whom he lost, temporarily, the light heart of youth, and whom he thinks that he might have married had he not deemed it prudent to journey northward toward a cooler clime. In New Orleans, at about that time, he first saw the then young comedian John E. Owens: and he records the fact that his ambition to excel as an actor was awakened by the spectacle of that rival's success. Owens has had his career since then,--and a brilliant one it was,--and now he sleeps in peace.