Sheridan’s engagement at the Baldwin terminated December 28, and the next night the well-known English melodrama of “The World,” by Paul Merritt, Henry Pettitt, and Augustus Harris, was performed there, for the first time in America. (Several years later, after Belasco had become established in New York, he was employed by Charles Frohman to make a revival of this play, which had been introduced to our Stage under his direction, in New Orleans.) On January 10, 1881, a drama called “The Eviction,” depicting some aspects of the landlord and tenant disturbances then rife in Ireland, was brought out and filled one week. On January 17 it was succeeded by a play called “Wedded by Fate,” the joint work of Edward Captain Field and Henry B. McDowell, son of General Irvin McDowell. The younger McDowell, possessed of wealth, proposed, through Belasco, to subsidize a production of their play in order to get it before the public, and Maguire, pressed for money, eagerly assented to that arrangement. Belasco, recalling the incident of bringing forth “Wedded by Fate” and the peculiarities of its principal author, writes thus: “An instance of the casual devotee of the Theatre was young McDowell, son of the famous Union general. Our first interview was most amusing. I remember how he stutterred: ’I s-s-should l-l-like to b-be an a-a-a-actor,’ he said, with difficulty. He also, in common with many others, believed that he could write a successful play and agreed that if I produced something of his very own he would finance it and would guarantee a certain bonus. His first effort--I forget the name of it--cost him a trifle of a fortune, but inasmuch as it was a local play by a local author people flocked to see it. When I met him years afterwards in New York he was still obsessed by the theatrical bee, from which he never recovered. With Franklin Sargent he opened The Theatre of Arts and Letters and lost a fortune. If I had not been, at the time, under contract to the Lyceum Theatre I should have joined McDowell in that undertaking.”