“About this time [1874-’75?] I think it was that I completed my play, ’The Doll Master,’ which served so many emotional actresses on the road. It was founded on many incidents in my Virginia City career, and I remember how much I made of the scene occurring in the house of Annie Grier. I even went to the extreme of introducing the casket of the dead girl, and her weeping companions around it. Then it was that I learned my first big lesson in _suggestion_--a lesson which has been one of the greatest that has ever been brought home to me. As a dramatist it was not incumbent on me to show everything to the audience--only enough to stimulate the imagination. My task was to let the audience know that somewhere near was the casket. How many times since then have I spent hours and hours devising the best means of thus appealing to the imagination. In the olden days when there was a battle scene a scanty crowd of supers was marshalled upon the stage in farcical fashion, and you could hear the tin armor rattle as the warriors fought half-heartedly. This matter of suggestion being uppermost in my mind, it occurred to me that much more effect could be gained, as far as proportion and magnitude were concerned, by having those fights off stage. I put this theory of mine into practice when the time came for me to produce my ’The Girl I Left Behind Me.’ The audience heard the Indians chanting, and heard the approach of the United States soldiers off stage, and they did not know whether there were ten or ten thousand men at hand. It is my impression that this was the first instance of suggested warfare seen in the East.” The principle here expounded is exactly right,--and, as used in the original production of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” it was splendidly successful. Yet when that drama was revived, March 12, 1894, at the Academy of Music, where it ran till June 2, Belasco, deferring to an alleged or assumed requirement of popular taste, introduced, at the climax of the Third Act, a troop of mounted cavalry, which dashed upon the stage--and, though popular enough with the “groundlings,” spoiled the artistic effect of the play. An interesting sidelight with regard to the writing of “The Girl I Left Behind Me” is provided in the following fragment of reminiscence by Belasco,--though, whether consciously or not, it is certain that the influence of Boucicault’s “Jessie Brown” (which he had produced in San Francisco in his stock company days) operated on his mind in writing his Indian drama: A SUGGESTIVE REMINISCENCE OF FRONTIER DAYS. Writing of the inception of this play, Belasco says: