Next, during the season of 1878–79, Miss Rehan was for a brief period in the company of Fanny Davenport. In the course of this engagement a now forgotten play, _Pique_, was acted by Miss Davenport, and Ada Rehan was given the part of Mary Standish. The author of the play was Augustin Daly. When it was given at the Grand Opera House in New York, in April, 1879, Mr. Daly again was struck by the promise of the young actress whom he had seen as Bianca in Albany a year and a half before. Immediately he placed her under his management and gave her the part of Big Clémence in his own version of Zola’s _L’Assommoir_, which he produced at the Olympic Theatre the following month. It was a small part, she did it well, and within a few weeks was promoted to the part of Virginie. In September of the same year she appeared for the first time on the stage of Daly’s Theatre, which was built, oddly enough, on the site of Wood’s Museum,[136] where six years ago she had acted her small part in _The Thoroughbred_. It is worth mentioning that the first parts--both in September, 1879--in the long list, literally of hundreds, that she was to act during her twenty years with Mr. Daly were Nelly Beers in _Love’s Young Dream_, and Lu Ten Eyck in _Divorce_. With Ada Rehan the leading woman of the reorganized Daly company there began a new era in her career, in Mr. Daly’s, and, it is fair to say, in American acting. Until Mr. Daly’s death in 1899 Miss Rehan retained her position, and in that time she progressed from obscurity to the position of one of the leading actresses of her day, famous alike in America and England, and famous even on the continent of Europe. With Mr. Daly’s death, though she continued to act and to act well, there passed the period of her peculiar fame, and in a half-dozen years she had ceased to act altogether. Such, in bald and brief outline, has been Rehan’s career. Of the struggles, the aspirations, the triumphs of an actress, of her life, in short, any mere record can tell but little.