[166] The parts she played in this childhood period included: Duke of York in _Richard III_; Willie Lee in _Hunted Down_; Prince Arthur in _King John_, and others of Shakespeare’s children; Damon’s son in _Damon and Pythias_; Little Fritz in _Fritz_; Paul in _The Octoroon_; Franko in _Guy Mannering_; Sybil in _The Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing_; Mary Morgan in _Ten Nights in a Barroom_; the child in _Across the Continent_; the boy in _Bosom Friends_; Alfred in _Divorce_; Lucy Fairweather in _The Streets of New York_; the gamin and Peachblossom in _Under the Gaslight_; Marjorie in _The Rough Diamond_; the child in _The Little Rebel_; Adrienne in _Monsieur Alphonse_; Georgie in _Frou-Frou_; Heinrich and Minna in _Rip van Winkle_; Eva in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_; the child in _The Chicago Fire_; Hilda in _Karl and Hilda_; Ralph Rackstraw in _Pinafore_; Clip in _A Messenger from Javis Section_; the sun god in _The Ice Witch_; children and fairies in _Aladdin_, _The White Fawn_ and other spectacular pieces; François in _Richelieu_; and Louise in _The Two Orphans_. [167] “The extraordinary thing about Mrs. Fiske’s early career is that she should have been even _permitted_ to play the range of characters that she did.... Frequently a young woman who is physically well developed easily passes for a much older person, and the eye is satisfied even if the ear be not, but little Minnie _was_ little, and held her audiences then by her genius, as she subsequently has continued to do.”--Griffith. [168] It is of this period that Mildred Aldrich wrote, in her article on Mrs. Fiske in _Famous American Actors of To-day_: “It was twilight on a very cold day when I knocked at her room at Hotel Vendome. A clear voice bade me enter and in a moment I had forgotten my cold drive. It was a voice which I can never forget, and which even as I write of it comes to my ear with a strange delicious insistence. As the door closed behind me there rose from the depths of a large chair, and stood between me and the dim light from the window a slender, childish figure, in a close-fitting, dark gown. The fading light, the dark dress, threw into greater relief the pale face with its small features and deep eyes, above and around which, like a halo, was a wealth of curling red hair. I had been told that she was young; but I was not prepared for any such unique personality as hers, and I still remember the sensation of the surprise she was to me as a most delightful experience. This was not the conventional young actress to whom I have been accustomed; this slight, undeveloped figure, in its straight, girlish gown reaching only to the slender ankles. There was a pretty assumption of dignity; there was a constant cropping out in bearing, in speech, in humor and in gestures of delicious, inimitable, unconcealable youth which was most fetching and which had something so infinitely touching in it.