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