Be Continued From Month to Month
and Include All the Most Prominent Players

MISS ADAMS'S INFANT ROLE.

Irritated by the Complaints of a Comedian,
Her Thespian Mother Offered Her as
a Substitute for a Property Baby.

The man who is responsible for Maude Adams's first appearance on the stage
is now the prosperous proprietor of a wholesale liquor store in Salt Lake
City. A jolly Englishman, his name is Phil Margetts, and at that time he
was an actor, the popular comedian of the Salt Lake Theater, the biggest
playhouse west of the Rockies, under the favored patronage of Brigham
Young.

It was back in 1873, and Annie Adams was leading woman in the stock
company maintained there. The daughter of one of the Utah pioneers, she
had gone on the stage some eight years previous, and had not allowed her
marriage to a business man, one James Kiskadden, to interfere with her
career.

Maude was born on November 11, 1872, and as the family lived very close to
the theater the child was practically brought up in the very odor of
Thespianism.

On one occasion, according to John S. Lindsay in "The Mormons and the
Theater," the regular bill of the evening was followed by the usual farce
intended to send the people home in good humor. It was called "The Lost
Child," and in it Margetts was cast for the father of the strayed or
stolen infant. At the eleventh hour the comedian discovered to his disgust
that he was expected to carry on the stage and fondle a rag doll instead
of the real thing.

"But I thought you were going to provide me with a flesh-and-blood baby,"
he indignantly demanded of Millard, the property man.

"I tried to, Phil," replied this long-suffering individual, "but, honest,
I couldn't get one. Nobody wanted to let her baby out of her arms, even
for a minute."

"Ye gods!" exclaimed Margetts. "Not a baby to be had in the Mormon
capital!"

Time was pressing, and he appealed to Mr. Caine, the stage manager. The
two were still wrangling over the matter when Mrs. Kiskadden almost
literally threw nine-months-old Maude into the breach.

It was in San Francisco, some five years later, that the little girl
"walked" on for the first time. This was with J.K. Emmet, in the old Bush
Street Theater, as _Little Schneider_ in one of his "Fritz" plays. Her
mother was a member of the company, but her father did not altogether
approve of Maude's histrionic attempts. They were speaking of the matter
at the dinner-table o