tion of every new drama, either in this country or abroad, is witnessed by dozens of managers, play brokers and native American dramatists, and if the piece has any value whatever the author can sign for his next work before midnight. A dramatist, now well known, in telling me of his first great success, said: "Broadway was laughing at me at eight o'clock, but at half-past eleven I met Al Hayman in the lobby, and he offered me twenty thousand dollars for my interest."

Another story illustrating my point is that of "Leah Kleschna," which was produced by Mr. Fiske after it had been refused by almost every manager of prominence in New York. By noon of the day following its first presentation the author had sold his next play, as yet unwritten, to Klaw and Erlanger, and had their check for advance royalties in his pocket. "Nancy Stair" proved a dismal failure when it was presented in dramatic form, but that did not prevent one of the most experienced managers in the country from offering Mrs. Lane, the author of the book, a thousand dollars for the dramatic rights of her next novel, as yet unwritten.

Charles Klein received no less than twenty-nine orders for plays during the production of "The Lion and the Mouse," in the past season. Channing Pollock produced "The Little Grey Lady" early in February and has contracted since then for five new plays to be finished by the close of this season.

With a competition as keen as this, the manager who enters an overcrowded field with a scheme of management frankly opposed to the injurious system of long runs will find it a very difficult matter to secure the work of dramatists of established position.

It is quite certain, therefore, that a dramatist of the first rank would prefer to place his piece either in the hands of a frankly commercial syndicate manager like Mr. Frohman, who would make it

in those of the anti-syndicate Mr. Belasco, who would be certain to stage it in such a manner as to give the fullest value to every scene and line, and thus add materially to its chances of success, than to trust to an aggregation of millionaires, no matter how wealthy, who were trying to do away with long runs.

Now, there is more than one way by which the projectors of the endowed theater may render our stage a real service, besides increasing the surplus of theaters and establishing an uplifting exhibition of fashionables in their high-priced boxes. They may, provided it does not interfere with their plans for the destruction of "commercialism," present Shakespearean and other English dramas of the highest class at low prices for the benefit of the great play-going public. Mr. Henry V. Donnelly did this at his Murray Hill Theater, and found that his public required him to devote one-tenth of his season to Shakespeare; nor did he, while so doing, give us any talk about "elevating the masses." The new theater might also be devoted to the production of dramas not commercially successful, and to experimenting with untried dramatic quantities. Performances of the plays of such advanced writers as Ibsen, Maeterlinck and Hauptmann, presented by competent actors, carefully rehearsed, would prove of great educational value to those interested in the art of the stage, and in the course of time a real audience of genuine playgoers might be rallied to their support.

They may render an infinitely greater service by an intelligent effort to increase the source of our play supply by developing in the younger generation some rudimentary knowledge of the art of dramatic construction. There is a wider and deeper interest in playwriting than in any halfdozen arts, trades and professions combined. The desire for food, drink and flattery is not more natural to us than that feeling for the stage which leads us to

dramatic situations in which we ourselves play the star parts. There are very few intelligent persons living who have not at some time or other desired to write plays, and it would be difficult to compute the amount of talent and energy that these have wasted simply because they have not been started right in what might have proved an agreeable and profitable vocation. I do not, of course, mean to say that the complete art of playwriting could be taught in a given number of lessons, but I do say that a class of bright, ambitious young students could receive rudimentary instruction of a kind that would set them right at the beginning of their journey, and light by the lamp of others' experience the rough, stony path that they must travel. At present they are simply groping in the dark, and can gain knowledge only by stumbling upon it unawares.

And, in closing, I would direct the at

tention of these men to two institutions in the town which, in a modest way, have done something toward supplying our stage with the dramas which it so sorely needs. These are Mr. Franklin H. Sargent's school of acting and the Lambs' Club. The first-named has presented a great many of its pupils in plays, both foreign and native, which have since won popularity on the professional boards. The last-named gives regular gambols in its club-house, at which plays written by the members are presented, and it is a well-known fact that a great many of the popular successes of to-day were first seen at these entertainments.

And it is worthy of remark that neither the Lambs nor the Sargent Academy place any reliance on millionaires, dress coats, society women, short runs, intellectual audiences, or even on theaters erected on any specified site.

T

HE Winstocks had Miltonmont practically to themselves that September, the season ending in August at the little peak-crowning hostelry in the Santa Cruz mountains, and it suited them exactly to have it so, for Winstock was tired of people, tired of everything; in fact-though perhaps he did not realize it-tired even of the salaaming of Fame, and Fame, he thanked heaven, was never waiting for him at Miltonmont.

One would have said of him that too many rather than too few of his dreams. had come true: the edge was worn from his zest as well as from his effort. Life had been for him a race in which he had outstripped many unpleasant things: poverty and obscurity and an inherent. spirit of restlessness. But there had been no halting places along the way, and he was beginning to show it. His mind, which had a really abnormal capacity for play, had had no play whatever.

When he was young his friends declared that whether he became a genius or a mediocrist depended on the girl he married; he was like a ship in an estuary, none stancher, nor sea-worthier, nor more gallantly rigged, but until the pilot came he must ride the waves at anchor.

Then Mary Ashley arrived, and, sensing the situation, married him, with the quietness and facility which marked all that she did. Another woman of her ability would have turned, perhaps, to a career of her own, but she must have understood, even in that early day, that her talent lay along the line of generalship rather than of fighting in the ranks.

From the valley in which her path merged with Winstock's they had climbed together to a very "heaven-kissing hill," she furnishing the ideal conditions neces

it; nor had the process by which he had expressed himself been tedious, for he was still a comparatively young man.

From the beginning there had been with him no posing, no halting, no tripping over mannerisms. He was himself big and lofty and salt as sea breeze, and he wrote as such a man should write, with spontaneity and masterfulness and power. And he gave her all the credit for his accomplishment, declaring that without her he would not have come within hailing distance of success. She was the majorgeneral of his affairs, he insisted, but she said she was merely a trumpet, sounding charges.

That the trumpet calls had recently become blasts, more and more prolonged, and that he responded to them with increasing effort and decreasing spirit, they had both begun vaguely and uncomfortably to understand.

As she sat, a small, straight-backed figure beneath the great cypress that forms the dome of one end of the rambling porch at Miltonmont, busily drawing thumbnail sketches for the book he was about to bring out, she glanced at him occasionally with a wishful, puzzled expression in her very clear, black eyes.

The sun was just setting; aflaunt against the crimsoned sky old Loma Prieta lifted her vineyards, while over the Skyland peak the moon already crept. Out of the orchard a wagon driven by a Chinese laborer came rattling with its load of apricots, and the smell of grapes was in the air.

The Winstocks sat in silence, he smoking, she busy with her work. At the other end of the porch paced a brokerish-looking little man in spotless flannels, whistling softly.

Winstock said. "She has been visiting in the east, while he and the children have been here. They are all excitement over her arrival."

Almost at the moment a wagonette came in at the gate, and the little man rushed down to meet it, while two boys as tall as he, and a girl of sixteen or so, who looked like him, came tearing across the grounds and waited with him for the driver to back the wagon up to the steps.

A plain little middle-aged woman emerged from it and was seized at once by the youngsters before her husband could reach her. They squeezed and patted and kissed her; they held her off and caught her to them again; they mussed and teased and laughed over her, and then they let her go and she ran into their father's arms.

In a whirlwind of excited merriment they seemed to swirl round and round the entrance until the big doors sucked them in, and afterward the Winstocks could hear from the wing of the house, where their rooms were located, peals of laughter, young and middle-aged, and the music of their eager voices ringing out.

A curious sense of injury filled Mary Winstock-when had she ever had such a welcome? To be sure she had left her husband only a few times, for he had declared that he could not do without her, and she knew that it was true, but only the past winter she had been called away for a fortnight and she was thinking now, with a wry little smile, of her home-coming. He had not been at the station to meet her, as she had expected, but he was waiting at the street door, and when she ran up the steps he had stooped, in his gentle, distinguished way, and had kissed her eye-brow gravely. Then they had gone in to dinner. And an hour later it was exactly as if she had never gone away.

Well, what had she wanted, she asked herself-that he should turn handsprings at the head of the steps in honor of her coming, or whoop-la like these

commonplace little woman, this plain little wife of a plain little man who, by his own confession, was of the simplest tastes and the dullest desires? She, John Winstock's helpmate!

She bent over her work, lips tucked complacently at the corners, eyes bright again; but, as she sketched, the gay, young voices kept assailing her ears, while the ridiculously deep tones of the little Danner, with always the promise or the echo of a laugh in them, kept ringing out, bell-clear and joyous in the gathering twilight.

What a tremendously good time they were having! It made her and Winstock, sitting there sedately side by side in their hooded chairs, appear suddenly very old and very lonely. Glancing at him she wondered if he were not feeling the same thing, for he frowned over his cigar and, throwing it away, presently got up to tramp along the walk, his shoulders falling into the stoop that until recently had been so foreign to them and which she so deplored.

What did they miss, he and she, she asked herself as she watched him-children, boys and girls like the broker's? She had been accustomed, in her girlhood, to think of children of her own and of the happiness they would be to her, but she had discovered early in her married life that her husband's career would occupy her quite fully, and it was to that she had dedicated herself.

They had been very poor in those days, and children would have meant an unwise deviation from her plan of life for Winstock-a falling out of step with Literature, if not an actual turning aside to supply the demands of a growing family. There would have been deep grinding of the wheels of domesticity, distraction, and interruption and hindrance. Little bodies would have demanded a share of Winstock's attention and care; little minds would have needed his guidance. In the early mornings, when the Muse is sup

small frocks to button and small faces to wash-for these were services they could not then have afforded to buy-and in the nights, vigils to keep. No, the way they had set out upon was too precarious, the goal of their ambition too difficult of attainment to permit such luxury.

But if either of them poignantly regretted their childlessness they had not spoken of it to each other; and as she lay back in her chair in the twilight she was certain it was not children that they missed.

That they missed anything she would not until recently have admitted, but now she no longer denied it; she only wondered if he felt it as keenly as she did.

There had been no time of awakening for her, no especial moment of illumination, no startling confrontation of any sort; she had merely realized, by a very gradual process, that something was wrong. It was, to her, as if they had stopped in the chantry when the cathedral of life itself waited for them.

Not that they were unhappy, she still stoutly maintained, but that they were merely not quite happy, and partial happiness, like partial success, was unbearable to her. Of a certainty to be great in the mouths of men was not everything. Yet, what lacked? What? For months she had asked herself the question. With the possessions of Ahab did they sigh for Naboth's little vineyard? With garners overrun did a neighbor's garden plot of content tantalize them?

The smile with which the broker had wrapped his wife on her arrival-the smile that had been a more perfect caress to Mary Winstock than the opening of his arms, or his kiss upon her lifted face, seemed to flash out again before her. She felt suddenly cold and impoverished, but her buoyant common sense came quickly to the rescue. Was love made merely of caresses? Was not theirs the perfect intimacy, the true understanding, hers and John's? How absurd it had been for

that life lacked savor for them because they had not known more of the fellowship of the commonplace, the intimacy of little things; because, in short, they had not pored over expense accounts together and gossiped over their neighbors, and trotted off to market, as some foolish folk she knew, swinging a provision basket blithely between them, or larked together at impossible French restaurants.

Her thoughts came to a sudden halt, as a regiment marching bravely down a street is brought up by a sharp, unexpected command: had she hit suddenly upon the solution of the whole difficultywas it that there had been nowhere any larking? Was it the "all work and no play" that had made them dull? Had they lived too long in the land "where no man pipes and where all men pay?" Had they put his career above everything else -above their natural desires and their natural tastes and inclination, above himself, the man, and herself, the woman?

But success means concentration, and concentration means-she broke off with an impatient gesture. It was the old, old ground over which she had gone so often during the assiduous and almost solitary years of her married life.

She got up from the hooded chair and went to where Winstock stood by the orchard gate.

"I think I'll go down to Evermeyer's cottage," she said, "his son came home sick to-day, and perhaps there is something I can do to help them."

"Shall I come along?" he asked.

"Oh, no; I don't mind the woods after night, as you know," and she went down through the orchard and the vineyard beyond into the slope of forest, with its redwoods and eucalyptus and madrones.

Evermeyer had been a gardener at Miltonmont for years, but he was a very old man now, and no longer equal to the work. He kept his little cabin at the foot of the grounds and lived there alone, a pathetic figure, his life wrapped about the