About this time Mary Anderson met with the first serious rebuff in her hitherto so successful career. It happened, too, in California, the State of her birth, where she was to have a somewhat rude experience of the old adage, that "a prophet has no honor in his own country." John McCullough was then managing with great success the principal theater in San Francisco, and offered her a two weeks' engagement. But California would have none of her. The public were cold and unsympathetic, the press actually hostile. The critics declared not only that she could not act, but that she was devoid of all capability of improvement. One, more gallant than his fellows, was gracious enough to remark that, in spite of her mean capacity as an artist, she possessed a neck like a column of marble. It was only when she appeared as Meg Merrilies that the Californians thawed a little, and the press relented somewhat. Edwin Booth happened to be in San Francisco at the time, and it was on the stage of California that Mary Anderson first met the distinguished actor who had been her early stage ideal. He told her that for ten years he had never sat through a performance till hers; and the praises of the great tragedian went far to console her for the coldness and want of sympathy in the general public. It was by Booth's advice, as well as John McCullough's, that she now began to study such parts as Parthenia, as better suited to her powers than more somber tragedy. Those were the old stock theater days in America, when every theater had a fair standing company, and relied for its success on the judicious selection of stars. This system, though perhaps a somewhat vicious one, made so many engagements possible to Mary Anderson, whose means would not have admitted of the costlier system of traveling with a special company.