“After our engagement was finished inducements came to me from all quarters to give up my New York opportunity and continue with ’American Born.’ I knew there was a fortune in the play, but I was loath to come East with the reputation of a writer and producer of highly sensational melodrama. I had an uneasy feeling that it would hurt me with the powers at the Madison Square. Of course I could have kept my interest in ’American Born’ without letting my name appear, but I was going to a new land, practically to begin all over again, and I wanted to enter it free of any possible handicap. So I took the claptrap manuscript and burned it.” Soon after making that fiery purgation Belasco left Chicago and came to New York to confront Daniel Frohman and negotiate concerning employment under that manager. THE MADISON SQUARE THEATRE. The Madison Square Theatre, situated on the south side of Twenty-fourth Street, a little way westward from Madison Square and adjacent to the old Fifth Avenue Hotel, stood on the site of what had been Daly’s first Fifth Avenue Theatre, opened August 17, 1869, and burnt down January 1, 1873. That site had, previous to 1869, been for several years occupied by a building, erected in the Civil War time, by Amos R. Eno, and devoted to public amusements. I remember it as once the professional abode of negro minstrels, and again as a sort of vaudeville theatre conducted by a journalist, then well-known, Thaddeus W. Meighan (1821-18--). In 1868 the notorious James Fisk, Jr., acquired control of it, and, in a much improved condition, it was opened, January 25, 1869, as Brougham’s Theatre, and such it continued to be until the following April 3, when Fisk summarily ousted Brougham and presently installed a company of French performers in opera bouffe, headed by Mlle. Irma. A few weeks later Augustin Daly obtained a lease of the building from Fisk, made extensive alterations in it, and opened it as the Fifth Avenue Theatre. Some time after its destruction by fire, in 1873, it was rebuilt, and presently it was leased by James Steele Mackaye (1842-1894), an actor and manager of rare talent and eccentric character, who named it the Madison Square Theatre, and opened it, April 23, 1879, with a revival (as “Aftermath; or, Won at Last”) of his play which had originally and successfully been produced, as “Won at Last,” December 10, 1877, at Wallack’s Theatre. Later, Mackaye formed an association with the Mallory brothers,--the Rev. Dr. George Mallory, editor of an ecclesiastical newspaper called “The Churchman,” and Marshall H. Mallory, a highly energetic and enterprising man of business,--the Mallorys becoming the proprietors of the theatre and Mackaye the manager. Under this new control great changes were made in the building; the auditorium was newly and richly decorated, a double stage, which could be raised and lowered, thus facilitating changes of