“ ... We drifted away from each other in old ’Frisco, in the early seventies, and chance has kept us distant from each other.... You and I lived near each other, in the old days,—you in Louisa Street, I, a block away, in Shipley. We went to the old Lincoln School and travelled through the same grades ... and in them all we were together. Do you remember when you and I started a Circulating Library, in your home? You had quite a collection of books and I had a number also, and we put them on shelves in your house. Not long after a fire came along and destroyed our good intentions.... We also had our theatrical performances, in the basement of my home, when the price of admission was a gunny-sack or a beer bottle. You were the star actor and our presentations were often attended by the grown-ups.... I remember when Queen Emma, of the Hawaiian Islands, visited our school, and the entire body of students were marched upstairs to the big hall to see and entertain her. You recited your famous selection, “The Madman” [Lewis’s “The Maniac”]. Another pupil and myself did a little better than the bunch: I think the other boy’s name was Moore. He and I kissed the Queen, and it was the talk of the school for some time. She took the kisses all right, and we got a lecture for our audacity, and perhaps a licking....”

HARD TIMES IN EARLY DAYS.

The removal of the Belasco family from Victoria to San Francisco was not attended by material prosperity, and for several years the family suffered the pinch of poverty. Young David keenly felt the necessity of helping his parents, and by every means in his power he tried to do so. His conduct, in those troublous years, as it has been made known to me, not only in conversations with himself, but in communications by his surviving relatives, provides a remarkable example of filial devotion. As a lad, in Victoria, he had shown surprising facility in learning the Indian language and frequently had acted as interpreter for Indians who traded with his father; also, he had manifested that lively and shrewd propensity for trading which is peculiar to the Jew. As a lad, in San Francisco, while attending school as often as possible, he regularly remained at home, after the morning session, every Friday, in order to assist his mother in washing clothes for the family, a labor which, being then of low stature, he could perform only by standing on a large box, thus being enabled to reach into the washtub. He would also help his mother in the drudgery of the kitchen, and then often do for her the necessary household marketing for the coming week; and he would make up, every week, the records and accounts of his father’s business in the shop. When neither at school nor occupied at home he would seek and perform any odd piece of work by which a trifle might be earned. He was by nature a book-lover and acquisitive of information: he had access to several public libraries, but he craved ownership of books, and from time to time he earned a little money for the purchase of them by recitations, sometimes given in the homes of his friends, sometimes at church entertainments, sometimes at Irish-American Hall and other similar places. For each of such recitations he received two dollars, and on some nights he recited two, three, or four times. As he grew older, especially after 1868, his efforts to obtain employment at theatres grew more and more constant, and, as already said, they were occasionally successful. His activities, indeed, were such that it is a wonder his health was not permanently impaired,—but he was possessed of exceptional vitality, which happily has endured. Once he worked for a while as a chore-boy in a cigar store and factory, where he washed windows, scrubbed floors, and rendered whatever menial service was required, opening the place at morning and closing it at evening. That was a hard experience, but it led to something better, because the keeper of the cigar-shop, taking note of him and his ways, procured for him a better situation, which for some time he held, in a bookstore. There he had access to many books, and he eagerly improved every opportunity of reading. A chief recreation of his consisted in haunting the wharves, gazing at the ships, and musing and wondering about the strange tropical lands from which they came and to which presently they would sail away.

THE SENTIMENTAL STOWAWAY.

There was one singular consequence of Belasco’s interest in ships and his somewhat extravagant and sentimental fancy which is worth special record. The tragedian John McCullough used frequently to recite, with pathetic effect, a ballad, once widely known, by Arthur Matthison (1826-1883), called “The Little Hero,”—originally named “The Stowaway,” and first published in “Watson’s Art Journal,” New York. The earliest record I have been able to find of McCullough’s delivery of this ballad in San Francisco states that he recited it on the occasion of a performance given for the benefit of Lorraine Rogers, director of the California Theatre, on November 30, 1869. Then or, perhaps, earlier (since McCullough was in San Francisco as early as 1866) Belasco heard him, and his febrile fancy, already superheated by excessive reading of morbid sensation stories, was so fired by the recitation that he felt impelled to submit himself to a similar experience. In his “Story” he gives the following account of his adventure as a Stowaway:

“The story of ’The Little Hero’ related the adventures of a stowaway who was discovered in his hiding-place by the sailors when they were in mid-ocean, and the lad was forced to work, and was beaten and starved into the bargain. As a boy I had read a like tale, which had so stirred my imagination that I used to dream of it by night, and in my spare time by day I would wander along the wharves to gaze at the shipping. How it happened I don’t quite know, but my feet led me on board a boat and, simply as an experiment, I hid myself. Then a rash notion came into my head! Suppose I stayed where I was and put into practice what the poem had so graphically described! For thirty hours I crouched behind my sable bulwark, and after interminable sailing it seemed to me about time that I was discovered, so I made myself visible. I was dragged up on

JOHN MC CULLOUGH

“This was the noblest Roman of them all!”
—Julius Caesar