There was nothing in her home surroundings to guide in the direction of a dramatic career; indeed her parents seemed to have entertained the not uncommon dread of the temptations and dangers of a stage life for their daughter, and only yielded at last before the earnest passionate purpose to which so much of Mary Anderson’s after success is due.  They bent wisely at length before the mysterious power of genius which shone out in the beautiful child long before she was able fully to understand whither the resistless promptings to tread the “mimic stage of life” were leading her.  In the end the New World gained an actress of whom it may be well proud, and the Old World has been fain to confess that it has no monopoly of the highest types of histrionic genius.

Mary Anderson was born at Sacramento, on the Pacific slope, on the 28th of July, 1859, but removed with her parents to Kentucky, when but six months old.  German and English blood are mingled in her veins, her mother being of German descent, while her father was the grandson of an Englishman.  On the outbreak of the civil war he joined the ranks of the Southern armies, and fell fighting under the Confederate flag before Mobile.  When but three years old Mary Anderson was left fatherless, and a year or two afterward she and her little brother Joseph found almost more than a father’s love and care in her mother’s second husband, Dr. Hamilton Griffin, an old Southern planter, who had abandoned his plantations at the outbreak of the war, and after a successful career as an army surgeon, established himself in practice at Louisville.

Mary Anderson’s early years were characteristic of her future.  She was one of those children whose wild artist nature chafes under the restraints of home and school life.  Generous to a fault, the life and soul of her companions, yet to control her taxed to their utmost the parental resources; and it must be admitted she was the torment of her teachers.  Her wild exuberant spirits overleaped the bounds of school life, and sometimes made order and discipline difficult of enforcement.  She was never known to tell an untruth, but at the same time she would never confess to a fault.  Imprisoned often for punishment in a room, she would steadfastly refuse to admit that she had done wrong, and, maternal patience exhausted, the mutinous little culprit had commonly to be released impenitent and unconfessed.  Indeed her wildness acquired for her the name of “Little Mustang;” as, later on, her fondness for poring over books beyond her childish years that of “Little Newspaper.”  At school, the confession must be made, she was refractory and idle.  The prosaic routine of school life was dull and distasteful to the child, who, at ten years of age, found her highest delight in the plays of Shakespeare.  Many of her school hours were spent in a corner, face to the wall, and with a book on her head, to restrain the mischievous habit of making faces at her companions, which used