Belasco was to have accompanied S. S. Shubert on the journey which proved his last and, had he done so, might have perished with him. “I have had three such ‘close calls,’” he has said to me: “Once, when I was a lad, I gave up an excursion trip on the Sacramento River to please my mother,--and the excursion boat was blown up soon after she left the dock. The second was when, at the last minute, I cancelled a trip to Cincinnati, with Charles Frohman. He took a secretary with him, the train was wrecked, and the secretary, sitting beside him where I would have been, was killed. The third was the trip with ‘Sam’ Shubert. We were to have gone to Pittsburgh together, on business connected with the Duquesne Theatre there, which, with the Shuberts, I took over and which was renamed the Belasco. If I had gone I am sure that I should have been killed in the wreck.” It is probable that he would have been: the train on which Shubert travelled to his death “side-swiped” a freight train, loaded with dynamite: many lives were lost. THE ADVENT OF FRANCES STARR.--BELASCO’S “THE ROSE OF THE RANCHO.” Frances Starr was born at Albany, New York, June 6, 1880, and made her first appearance on the stage as _Lucy Dorrison_, in Robertson’s “Home,” with a stock company, in that city, under the management of the late Frederic Bond. During the next six years she gained experience in various stock companies,--at the Murray Hill Theatre, New York; in San Francisco, in Boston, and at Proctor’s 125th Street Theatre, New York,--and, February 12, 1906, she appeared, in association with Charles Richman, as _Nell Colfax_, in “Gallops,”--a weak echo of Boucicault’s horse-racing plays of “The Flying Scud” and “The Jilt.” Belasco first saw her when she was acting at the Murray Hill, and his attention was again called to her by his brother Frederick, who, in 1905, wrote to him from San Francisco, praising her in high terms. Writing about Miss Starr, Belasco has given this account of her employment by him--certainly the most fortunate event of her life: