Belasco was fortunate in his early days in an acquaintance with an actor and theatrical agent, James H. McCabe, who loaned him many old plays, which he studied, and also with R. M. Edwards, a representative in San Francisco of Samuel French, the New York publisher of French’s Standard Drama, etc., who provided him with opportunity to augment his knowledge of theatrical publications and of plays in manuscript. McCabe sometimes procured professional employment for him, but his occupation was consistently desultory. He traversed the Pacific Coast, to and fro, during several years, with various bands of vagabond players, gleaning a precarious subsistence in a wild and often dangerous country, going south into Lower California and into Mexico, and going north to Seattle and to the home of his childhood, Victoria. Sometimes he ventured into the mountain settlements and mining camps of the inland country, travelling by stage when it was possible to do so, by wagon when he and his associates were lucky enough to have one, often on horseback or muleback, oftener on foot, performing in all sorts of places and glad and grateful for anything he could earn. His account of that period, as he has related it to me, is quite as replete with vicissitude, hardship, squalor, toil, romance, and misery as are the narratives over which the theatrical student muses, marvels, and saddens when reading the “Memoirs of Tate Wilkinson,” Ryley’s “Itinerant,” Charlotte Charke’s miserable narrative, or the story of Edmund Kean. “Many a time,” Belasco has told me, “I’ve marched into town, banging a big drum or tooting a cornet. We used to play in any place we could hire or get into,—a hall, a big dining room, an empty barn; anywhere! I spent much of my second season on the stage (if it can be called ’on the stage’) roaming the country, and in that way got my first experience as a stage manager,—which meant being responsible for everything; and in the years that followed I had many another such engagement. I’ve interviewed an angry sheriff ’many a time and oft’ (the sheriffs generally owned the places we played in), or an angrier hotel-keeper, when we couldn’t pay our board. I’ve been locked up because I couldn’t pay a dollar or two for food and a bed; I’ve washed dishes and served as a waiter; I’ve done pretty much everything, working off such debts; and sometimes I’ve had the exciting pleasure of running away, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, before the hotel-keeper got ’on’ that we hadn’t money enough to

pay. I acted many parts in my first seasons ’on the road’—among them Raphael, in ’The Marble Heart’; Mr. Toodle, in the farce of ’The Toodles’; Robert Macaire; Hamlet; Uncle Tom; Modus, in ’The Hunchback’; Marc Antony, in ’Julius CÆsar’; Dolly Spanker, in ’London Assurance’; Mercutio, and scores of others I can’t instantly call to mind.”

After considerable of the nomadic experience thus indicated, Belasco, returning to San Francisco, obtained, through his friend McCabe, an engagement in the company of Annie Pixley (Mrs. Robert Fulford, 1858-1893), remembered for her performance of M’liss, in a rough melodrama, by Clay M. Greene, remotely based on Bret Harte’s tenderly human and touching story bearing that name. For Annie Pixley he made a serviceable domestic drama on the basis of Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden” (which poem had been published in 1864), and he acted in it, with her, as Philip Ray. That subject had been brought on the stage in a play by Mme. Julie de Marguerittes (1814-1866), in which Edwin Adams gained renown as the unhappy, heroic Enoch. For his play on the subject Belasco received from Fulford $25. Later, he figured as an itinerant peddler, frequenting fairs at various towns in the neighborhood of San Francisco. In this character his attire comprised a black coat and trousers, a “stovepipe” hat, and a wig and whiskers. “I used to buy goods on credit,” he told me, “and take them along; then I would get a soap-box or a barrel on the lot, or perhaps on a corner, and recite until I had a crowd, and then work attention ’round to my goods, which I generally managed to sell out.”