“The Octoroon” was played for two weeks and then, June 26, gave place to “Caryswold,” an inconsequential play which Belasco tinkered,—introducing into it a “Fire Scene, showing the destruction of a Mad-House,” suggested by the terrible passage in Reade’s “Hard Cash,” descriptive of the burning of an asylum for the insane and the escape of Alfred Hardy. Ada Ward, an English actress, who came from Australia, acted the principal part in it.

Gustave Frohman’s lease of the Baldwin Theatre expired on July 1, and on the 3rd Jay Rial, having hired the house for a week, presented “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” there. On July 10 occurred the last event of the first period of Belasco’s theatrical life,—the presentment at the Baldwin of “American Born.” Edward Marble, an actor who had come to San Francisco as a member of the “Hazel Kirke” company, was advertised as lessee of the theatre and the play was brought out under the auspices of Gustave Frohman. It was a free adaptation by Belasco of “British Born,” by Paul Merritt and Henry Pettitt, and was a wild and whirling, spread-eagle, bugle-blowing melodrama, in which the heroine, at a climax of desperate adventure, saves her lover from being shot to death by Bolivian soldiers by wrapping him in a flag of the United States. Its production was chiefly remarkable for handsome scenic investiture and a really impressive portrayal of a volcano in furious eruption. This was the cast of “American Born”: