After Helena had taken the name which she was to make so famous, there followed a few quiet years during which her ambitions lay in abeyance. When she was twenty her son Rudolphe was born. The little family, and Madame Opid as well, moved to Bochnia, a little town in Austrian Poland. Here it was that, owing to the circumstance that Bochnia possessed salt mines, Mme. Modjeska had her first opportunity to appear on a real stage. Some of the miners had been killed in an accident. It occurred to the Modjeskis to give, for the benefit of the bereaved families, some amateur theatricals. They met a friend, a dancing master named Loboiko, who obtained a hall, hastily built some scenery and acted as leading man of the company. There were but three others--a young man who was the dancing master’s pupil, Helena as leading lady, and Josephine, her younger sister. Stasia, their nine-year-old niece, was prompter. The plays were two pieces now forgotten--_The White Camelia_, in one act, in which Helena was a countess, and _The Prima-Donna_, in which she was an Italian peasant girl who became an actress. Delighted as she was to realize her cherished ambition to appear on the stage before an actual audience, when the bell rang for the rise of the curtain she was thoroughly frightened. Before she went on she could not think of her lines, and she fairly shook with nervousness. Yet once on the stage her words came to her and she found herself, much to her surprise, quite at her ease. The dignitaries and the country gentlemen of the district and the townspeople all turned out for the performance, and for the two others that followed it, in unexpectedly large numbers. Madame Modjeska’s acting, at this her first opportunity for showing it, attracted attention. An actor and stage manager from Warsaw, who happened to be in Bochnia and saw her act, asked her how long she had been on the stage,--an amusing and pleasing question,--and urged her to turn her eyes toward Warsaw. Such men do not pay empty compliments, and Helena’s confidence now took new hold. The prospect of going to Warsaw drove from her mind any idea of becoming a German actress. It was Warsaw and the Imperial Theatre, or die!