Previously, she had been “taken on” when the action required the presence of a baby, and soon afterwards little Minnie appeared between the farce and the tragedy to do her songs and dances. At three came her first premeditated speaking appearance,[163] as the Duke of York in _Richard III_, and from that day to this, excepting brief periods in school[164] and a few years at the time of her marriage to Harrison Grey Fiske, in 1890, she has been continuously and busily engaged in her profession. Her career divides sharply into two periods. To the first of these, the twenty-five years that carried her to the time of her marriage, she is now disposed to be rather indifferent. When she refers at all to that time, which is not often, she speaks of the “prehistoric days.”[165] It was, nevertheless, a period of thorough schooling, arduous, but fruitful of technical excellence, and bringing early triumphs--a babyhood and girlhood apprenticeship which is today, for various reasons (one of them being laws in some states restricting the appearance of children on the stage) practically inaccessible. To indicate briefly her early experience it is enough to say that before she was sixteen Minnie Maddern had appeared not only with her father’s company, but with a dozen or more of the stars of the day, Laura Keene, J. K. Emmet, Lucille Western, John McCullough, Joseph Jefferson, E. L. Davenport, and the rest of that almost forgotten day. She went through the whole range of juvenile parts,[166] soubrettes, harassed young heroines, boys, fairies, the lads of Shakespeare’s plays, and so on through the list, playing wherever the need of a clever child actress called her. She wore long dresses on the stage long before she assumed them in her own person, and by the time she was sixteen she was conspicuously successful in old woman rôles![167] At sixteen, too, she became a star in New York, though this venture was ill-advised. She had won a public by her cleverness and her marked personality, but, much to her credit, she was not adapted to the crude and blatantly personal form of entertainment represented by _Fogg’s Ferry_, which was one of the “protean shows” of those days. She was to wait, indeed, many years more for the beginning of her identification with really significant drama. During this young womanhood, from sixteen to twenty-odd, she acted in plays which are never resurrected nowadays by even the most undiscriminating stock company, and which are remembered, if at all, by some old theatregoer who likes to recollect how appealingly, in _Caprice_, Minnie Maddern used to sing “In the Gloaming.” _The Storm Child_, _In Spite of All_, _The Child Wife_, _The Puritan Maid_, _Lady Jemima_, _Featherbrain_--these are not so much as names nowadays, even to those who know the theatre well. She had gained thorough, indispensable training, but as yet no memorable achievement.[168]