to convulse the school with ill-suppressed laughter.  She would sally forth in the morning with her little satchel, fresh and neat as a daisy, to return at night with frock in rents, and all the buttons, if any way ornamental, given away in an impulsive generosity to her schoolmates.  It soon became evident that she would learn little or nothing at school; and on a faithful promise to amend her ways if she might only leave and pursue her studies at home, Mary Anderson was permitted, when but thirteen years of age, to terminate her school career.  But instead of studying “Magnall’s Questions,” or becoming better acquainted with “The Use of the Globes,” she spent most of her time in devouring the pages of Shakespeare, and committing favorite passages to memory.  To her childish fancy they seemed to open the gates of dreamland, where she could hold converse with a world peopled by heroes, and live a life apart from the prosaic everyday existence which surrounded her in a modern American town.  Shakespeare was the teacher who replaced the “school marm,” with her dull and formal lessons.  Her quick perceptive mind grasped his great and noble thoughts, which gave a vigor and robustness to her mental growth.  Since those days she has assimilated rather than acquired knowledge, and there are now few women of her age whose information is more varied, or whose conversation displays greater mental culture, and higher intellectual development.  Strangely enough, it was the male characters of Shakespeare which touched Mary Anderson’s youthful fancy; and she studied with a passionate ardor such parts as Hamlet, Romeo, and Richard III.  With the wonderful intuition of an art-nature, she seems to have felt that the cultivation of the voice was a first essential to success.  She ransacked her father’s library for works on elocution, and discovering on one occasion “Rush on the Voice,” proceeded, for many weeks before it became known to her parents, to commence under its guidance the task of building up a somewhat weak and ineffective organ into a voice capable of expressing with ease the whole gamut of feeling from the fiercest passion to the tenderest sentiment, and which can fill with a whisper the largest theater.

The passion for a theatrical career seems to have been born in the child.  At ten she would recite passages from Shakespeare, and arrange her room to represent appropriately the stage scene.  Her first visit to the theater was when she was about twelve, one winter’s evening, to see a fairy piece called “Puck.”  The house was only a short distance from her home at Louisville, and she and her little brother presented themselves at the entrance door hours before the time announced for the performance.  The door-keeper happened to observe the children, and thinking they would freeze standing outside in the wintry wind, good naturedly opened the door and admitted Mary Anderson to Paradise—­or what seemed like it to her—­the empty benches of the dress circle, the dim half-light, the mysterious