Presenting himself at the box-office he made known his desires. A man inside looked him over and said he thought he would do, and told him to present himself on a certain day in the following week. Breese returned home to Brooklyn all aglow with anticipation, informed his mother of his good luck, and—well, was made very clearly to realize that school and home and the keeping of early hours were his métier just then.
It was some little time after this stirring of the Thespian bug in his blood that he received another inoculation—also in the City of Brotherly Love. He saw Dore Davidson in a performance of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and the characterization made such an impression on him that after he reached home he took the first opportunity of showing his mother a duplication of it.
At first she listened with the complaisant toleration of a parent anxious to appear interested in a child's enthusiasms, but presently young Breese became aware that she was following his depiction with absorbed attention.
"I really must have it in me to do something in the acting-line," he told himself.
Becomes a Farm Boy.
But soon after this a big change in his life occurred. He left Brooklyn and went West to study—what do you suppose? Nothing short of farming. It was decided that he should learn to become a tiller of the soil, although he had been born and brought up in a city.
At twenty dollars a month, then, he started in to milk the cows, do the chores and make himself generally useful about the place. But it did not take him long to discover that for a young fellow of eighteen, the prospects in such a life were not very illuminating.
Finally he decided to give it up, and he went to Kansas City, where he had a friend who obtained for him a post as bookkeeper in a mercantile establishment. He continued in this environment for several months, but one day he awoke to the fact that the more satisfactory he proved himself as a bookkeeper, the more likelihood there was that he would never rise to anything higher.
At this time he had twenty-one dollars in the bank, but it availed him little, as the bank failed. With what he had in his clothes, he set out for St. Louis, where he hadn't a friend, determined to find out if fate could not do something for him in a city so big as that.