“ ... We drifted away from each other in old ’Frisco, in the early seventies, and chance has kept us distant from each other.... You and I lived near each other, in the old days,--you in Louisa Street, I, a block away, in Shipley. We went to the old Lincoln School and travelled through the same grades ... and in them all we were together. Do you remember when you and I started a Circulating Library, in your home? You had quite a collection of books and I had a number also, and we put them on shelves in your house. Not long after a fire came along and destroyed our good intentions.... We also had our theatrical performances, in the basement of my home, when the price of admission was a gunny-sack or a beer bottle. You were the star actor and our presentations were often attended by the grown-ups.... I remember when Queen Emma, of the Hawaiian Islands, visited our school, and the entire body of students were marched upstairs to the big hall to see and entertain her. You recited your famous selection, “The Madman” [Lewis’s “The Maniac”]. Another pupil and myself did a little better than the bunch: I think the other boy’s name was Moore. He and I kissed the Queen, and it was the talk of the school for some time. She took the kisses all right, and we got a lecture for our audacity, and perhaps a licking....” HARD TIMES IN EARLY DAYS. The removal of the Belasco family from Victoria to San Francisco was not attended by material prosperity, and for several years the family suffered the pinch of poverty. Young David keenly felt the necessity of helping his parents, and by every means in his power he tried to do so. His conduct, in those troublous years, as it has been made known to me, not only in conversations with himself, but in communications by his surviving relatives, provides a remarkable example of filial devotion. As a lad, in Victoria, he had shown surprising facility in learning the Indian language and frequently had acted as interpreter for Indians who traded with his father; also, he had manifested that lively and shrewd propensity for trading which is peculiar to the Jew. As a lad, in San Francisco, while attending school as often as possible, he regularly remained at home, after the morning session, every Friday, in order to assist his mother in washing clothes for the family, a labor which, being then of low stature, he could perform only by standing on a large box, thus being enabled to reach into the washtub. He would also help his mother in the drudgery of the kitchen, and then often do for her the necessary household marketing for the coming week; and he would make up, every week, the records and accounts of his father’s business in the shop. When neither at school nor occupied at home he would seek and perform any odd piece of work by which a trifle might be earned. He was