ne day, and Mr. Kiskadden remarked to his wife:

"I won't have the child making a fool of herself."

Whereupon Maude, whom they had both supposed to be too busy with her knife
and fork to be paying any attention to the talk, broke in with:

"I'll not make a fool of myself, papa."

She had her way, and continued to act at intervals in companies where her
mother was employed, until she was sent to school, which she left to take
up her career again around 1888, when she was in her middle 'teens.

One of her child engagements in San Francisco found her in a play called
"Chums," at the Baldwin. This was the work of David Belasco, who had risen
at the theater from call-boy to stage manager and dramatist. The piece,
which afterward became famous under the name "Hearts of Oak," had in its
cast at the time James O'Neill, Lewis Morrison, and James A. Herne.
Belasco called the heroine _Chrystal_ (a name used later by Herne for his
own daughter, now leading woman with Arnold Daly), and Maude Adams was
little _Chrystal_.

Miss Adams passed from schoolgirl to school mistress in a play, Hoyt's "A
Midnight Bell," which was a great success at the Bijou Theater in New
York. Here Charles Frohman saw her work, and liked it so much that he
engaged her for the ingenue in his first stock company, then lodged at
Proctor's Twenty-Third Street Theater.

This was in the autumn of 1890, and Miss Adams's first appearance under
the Frohman regime was made in William Gillette's comedy-farce, "All the
Comforts of Home," in which she was cast as _Evangeline Bender_, daughter
of a retired produce dealer. Henry Miller led the list of players, which
was facetiously headed "Who's In It?"

The same jocose spirit prompted the further elucidations of the details in
the evening's entertainment on the house bill in this wise:

WHERE IS IT?

Drawing-room of a private house in London.

WHEN IS IT?

Now.

WHAT TIME IS IT?

Act 1. A morning.
Act 2. A few mornings later.
Act 3. Another morning.
Act 4. The same morning.
(Good morning.)

Was Stronger Than the Play.

In the same year, 1890, Miss Adams appeared at the same theater, in what
was styled its regular season, opening on October 21 as _Dora Prescott_,
another ingenue role, in De Mille and Belasco's "Men and Women." This was
followed in the fall of 1891, also at Proctor's, by De Mille's play from
the German, "The Lost Paradise," in which Miss Adam