Belasco was only twenty-nine years old when he brought his career in San Francisco to an end and embarked on the venture which was at last to establish him in the Theatre of New York. He had been eleven years on the stage. A brief retrospect and summary of his early achievement will be useful here. Throughout his life he had enjoyed the blessing of family affection, admiration, and sympathy, and he had received respectable schooling. Otherwise, his experience had been one of unremitting, strenuous, often anxious, toil; frequent hardship, injustice, disappointment,--in short, a painfully laborious struggle. He had been, in childhood, a circus rider, a newsboy, a messenger, a willing, helpful drudge, a shopboy in a cigar factory and in a bookstore; then, as he grew older, a scribbler for the newspapers, a salesman of haberdashery, an itinerant peddler, a strolling player, a reader and reciter, a mimic, a theatrical manager, an agent “in advance” of theatrical companies, a teacher of acting, a scene painter, a stage manager, and a playwright. He had seen much of the best acting of his period and had been intimately associated with many leaders of the Stage,--sometimes as student and assistant, sometimes as adviser and director. He had acted, in all sorts of circumstances and in all sorts of places, more than 170 parts,--ranging from mere bits to characters of the highest and most exacting order. He had altered, adapted, rewritten, or written more than 100 plays and he had been the responsible director in the production of more than three times that number. A catalogue is seldom interesting reading; nevertheless, students of the Theatre and of Belasco’s extraordinary career will do well to ponder the following significant though incomplete schedule of the plays set upon the stage under his direction prior to midsummer, 1882: