. The Argonaut . ronzes about him were forgotten; hewas thinking of his own checkered career ofmany years, and of the joke-loving Jeffersonas he had known him. He spoke: A reg-istered enemy of the United States at fifteen,a rebel soldier, a blockade-runner, and aprisoner of war before I was seventeen, suh;at the end of the Civil War a merchant inSavannah, Ga., with the late Henry , of African exploration fame, as myclerk; an actor in the barn-storming dayswhen provincial opera-houses were over liverystables; a cow-puncher when the drive fromTexas to Kansas was in vogue; a sheeprancher
. The Argonaut . ronzes about him were forgotten; hewas thinking of his own checkered career ofmany years, and of the joke-loving Jeffersonas he had known him. He spoke: A reg-istered enemy of the United States at fifteen,a rebel soldier, a blockade-runner, and aprisoner of war before I was seventeen, suh;at the end of the Civil War a merchant inSavannah, Ga., with the late Henry , of African exploration fame, as myclerk; an actor in the barn-storming dayswhen provincial opera-houses were over liverystables; a cow-puncher when the drive fromTexas to Kansas was in vogue; a sheeprancher; for years the boniface of the oldAvenue Hotel, and so acquainted with allthe old celebrities; permanent chairman ofsocials for twenty years in the Elk lodge atNew Orleans when Edwin Booth, both theSalvinis, John McCullough, and Joseph Jeffer-son were not infrequent visitors, and weremade to do their share of the entertaining,why, suh, is it any wonder that story-tellingcomes as easily and naturally to me as Rip. Joseph Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle. Van Winkles droll drawling came to dear oldJoe? There was a long reminiscent pause, whichI interrupted. Ah, you want to hear some-thing about Jefferson, do you? Well, let mesee, it was along about, just a few yearsafter the war, 1869, I believe, that Mr. Jeffer-son bought Orange Island, near Iberia, La.,a typical Southern plantation, where he lovedto study the crude manner of living andcruder wit and philosophy of the of Jeffersons best stories and bestpictures were drawn from this old Southernplantation life. He was even at that timean eager collector of china, bronzes, pictures,and other things of the sort, and spent muchof his leisure time poking around old the early eighties I was an antiquaireon the Rue Royale in New Orleans. Jeffer-sons friend, Dr. John Meux, a Southernaristocrat, brought him to my shop. At thattime in the Crescent City the Lebretonnes,the Labarres, the Boulignys, and other pa-trician
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectjournal, bookyear1877
