reputation, both marvelously grown.

After a brief period spent in diligent study, Mary Anderson fulfilled a
second engagement in New Orleans, which proved a great financial success.
The criticisms of this period all admit her histrionic power, though some
describe her efforts as at times raw and crude, faults hardly to be
wondered at in a young girl mainly self-taught, and with barely a year's
experience of the business of the stage.

About this time Mary Anderson met with the first serious rebuff in her
hitherto so successful career. It happened, too, in California, the State
of her birth, where she was to have a somewhat rude experience of the old
adage, that "a prophet has no honor in his own country." John McCullough
was then managing with great success the principal theater in San
Francisco, and offered her a two weeks' engagement. But California would
have none of her. The public were cold and unsympathetic, the press
actually hostile. The critics declared not only that she could not act,
but that she was devoid of all capability of improvement. One, more
gallant than his fellows, was gracious enough to remark that, in spite of
her mean capacity as an artist, she possessed a neck like a column of
marble. It was only when she appeared as Meg Merrilies that the
Californians thawed a little, and the press relented somewhat. Edwin Booth
happened to be in San Francisco at the time, and it was on the stage of
California that Mary Anderson first met the distinguished actor who had
been her early stage ideal. He told her that for ten years he had never
sat through a performance till hers; and the praises of the great
tragedian went far to console her for the coldness and want of sympathy in
the general public. It was by Booth's advice, as well as John
McCullough's, that she now began to study such parts as Parthenia, as
better suited to her powers than more somber tragedy. Those were the old