It was, originally, “booked” for a season of one month, but it was received with such abundant popular favor that it was acted there, to crowded houses, for twelve weeks,--receiving about eighty performances. There was some adversity of critical comment in the press, but only one stricture then made disturbed Belasco’s equanimity and has rankled in his recollection,--namely, the unwarranted and mean intimation that he had copied the stirring “mechanical effects” (so called) used in course of the performance of his play from William Gillette’s “Secret Service,” which had been brought out in London, May 15, 1897, at the Adelphi. Such gratuitous disparagement is characteristic of a patronizing and carping spirit frequently encountered in British journalism. Inquiry as to the facts in this case at once displays its injustice. Belasco’s “The Heart of Maryland” was begun in 1890, and the “mechanical effects” employed in it were devised by its author during the four years that followed; they were, furthermore, an elaboration and improvement of various contrivances first used by him in his variant of “Not Guilty,”--San Francisco, December 24, 1878,--and some of them were used by him in “The Girl I Left Behind Me,”--January, 1893. Gillette’s “Secret Service” was tried at the Broad Street Theatre, Philadelphia, May 13, 1895, where it failed and was at once withdrawn. After having been entirely rewritten that play was successfully produced at the Garrick Theatre, New York, October 5, 1896,--one year later than “The Heart of Maryland.” “Secret Service,” though a useful melodrama, is a hodge-podge fabrication (one of its most essential situations is conveyed, bodily, from “Don Cæsar de Bazan”) and is in every way inferior to “The Heart of Maryland”: if the production of either of those plays owed anything to that of the other, it is manifest that Belasco’s could not have been the debtor.