we went aloft to stow away the remnant of the last sail of all those which were on the ship twenty-four hours before. The spen

cers were now the only whole sails on the ship, and being strong and small, and near the deck, presenting but little surface to the wind above the rail, promised to hold out well. Hove-to under these, and eased by having no sail above the tops, the ship rose and fell, and drifted off to leeward like a lineof-battle ship.

All

It was now eleven o'clock, and the watch was sent below to get breakfast, and at eight bells (noon), as everything was snug, although the gale had not in the least abated, the watch was set, and the other watch and idlers sent below. For three days and three nights the gale continued with unabated fury, and with singular regularity. There were no lulls, and very little variation in its fierceness. Our ship, being light, rolled so as almost to send the fore yard-arm under water, and drifted off bodily to leeward. this time there was not a cloud to be seen in the sky, day or night; no, not so large as a man's hand. Every morning the sun rose cloudless from the sea and set again at night in the sea, in a flood of light. The stars, too, came out of the blue, one after another, night after night, unobscured, and twinkled as clear as on a still frosty night at home, until the day came upon them. All this time the sea was rolling in immense surges, white. with foam, as far as the eye could reach, on every side, for we were now leagues and leagues from shore.

The between-decks being empty, several of us slept there in hammocks, which are the best things in the world to sleep in during a storm; it not being true of them, as it is of another kind of bed," when the wind blows, the cradle will rock;" for it is the ship that rocks, while they always hang vertically from the beams. During these seventy-two hours we had nothing to do but to turn in and out, four hours on deck, and four below, eat, sleep, and keep watch. The watches were only varied by taking the helm in turn, and now and then by one of the sails, which were furled, blowing out of the gaskets, and getting adrift, which sent us up on the yards; and by getting tackles on different parts of the rigging, which were slack. Once the

wheel-rope parted, which might have been fatal to us, had not the chief mate sprung instantly with a relieving tackle to windward, and kept the tiller up, till a new one could be rove. On the morning of the twentieth, at daybreak, the gale had evidently done its worst, and had somewhat abated; so much so that all hands were called to bend new sails, although it was still blowing as hard as two common gales. One at a time, and with great difficulty and labor, the old sails were unbent and sent down by the buntlines, and three new topsails, made for the homeward passage round Cape Horn, and which had never been bent, were got up from the sailroom, and, under the care of the sailmaker, were fitted for bending, and sent up by the halyards into the tops, and, with stops and frapping lines, were bent to the yards, closereefed, sheeted home, and hoisted. These were done one at a time, and with the greatest care and difficulty. Two spare courses were then got up and bent in the same manner and furled, and a storm-jib with the bonnet off, bent and furled to the boom. It was twelve o'clock before we got through; and five hours of more exhausting labor I never experienced; and no one of that ship's crew, I will venture to say, will ever desire again to unbend and bend five large sails in the teeth of a tremendous north-wester. Towards night a few clouds appeared in the horizon, and as the gale moderated, the usual appearance of driving clouds relieved the face of the sky. The fifth day after the commencement of the storm, we shook a reef out of each topsail, and set the reefed fore-sail, jib and spanker; but it was not until after eight days of reefed topsails that we had a whole sail on the ship; and then it was quite soon enough, for the captain was anxious to make up for leeway, the gale having blown us half the distance to the Sandwich Islands.

Inch by inch, as fast as the gale would permit, we made sail on the ship, for the wind still continued ahead, and we had many days' sailing to get back to the longitude we were in when the storm took us. For eight days more we beat to windward under a stiff top-gallant breeze, when the wind shifted and became variable. A light south-easter, to which we could carry a reefed topmast studding-sail, did wonders for our dead reckoning.

I

T was during a rehearsal for a public gambol of The Lambs, a club whose membership is made up mostly of actors, that Charles Klein, the dramatist, made a certain suggestion.

"Do you think that will go?" asked one of the players, doubtfully.

"It always has," returned Mr. Klein, with an air of finality.

Every experienced playwright, every manager, every stage director, every intelligent actor who has passed his novitiate, knows of things that always have received a certain definite response. Many of these have been formulated. In the sad, glad days of prosperous melodrama they were known as "sure-fire hokum."

But the really important consideration of why the "hokum "was" sure-fire," and why other things as definitely failed, never seemed to be of the slightest interest to those connected with the theater, and their attitude is the same to-day.

The theatrical manager talks incessantly of "what the public wants," frequently with a suggestion of personal injury, as if he were a victim of carefully planned deceit. The simple truth is that the public doesn't know what it wants, and this is true of many other things than plays. We are too busy with interests that are more personal and seem more important to us. It is the business of the theatrical manager to find out what we want and to give it to us. That is what we pay him for.

To the managerial mind "the public" is just as real and as definite as "the average reader" in a publication office. Ever so many years ago I accepted "the average reader as a real, living entity, and straightway I set forth to find him, her, or it, being free of prejudice. For years I searched. High and low, in the open and in the by

ways, in the market-places and in the solitudes, earnestly I sought "the average reader." Of only one did I ever discover even so much as a trace. I am now firmly convinced that the only average reader of whom there is any record was Mrs. Harris, but I can't prove it, because Sairy Gamp is dead, too.

Mrs. Harrises make up the theatrical manager's public, and he knows it, as Mrs. Gamp knew her Mrs. Harris. But it is an entirely different public that pays money to the box office, or to the speculator, to see the plays the manager produces. With the outward behavior of this public the manager is thoroughly familiar, but he has the vaguest notion of what this behavior stands for, of what it really means.

The play that wins great popular favor is the one that appeals to big universals, stirring the emotions that most of us have in common. Novelty is an important factor, but the chief measure of success is the sureness and power of the appeal. The basic things are always the same, as unchanging as earth and sky and water and sunlight, and with almost as unlimited possibilities in combination and expression. The "sure-fire hokum of murderous melodrama encompassed, in a crudely elemental form it is true, nearly all the essentials of success in dramatic situation, most of the values that make popular favor for a play. The "sure-fire hokum" is a summing up in part of what has gone before and what will come after. The problem of the playwright is to translate ideas into the language familiarly spoken by the intelligence he is trying to reach. The sign language comes first, because it is the only one all human beings have in common. The problem of the manager is to determine whether or not the playwright has succeeded in thus presenting ideas that have commer

cial value. The public has no problem at all beyond deciding whether it wants to spend a quarter or two dollars to see the play.

Theodore Kramer, a highly educated man, began his career as a playwright by trying to write intellectual drama, and failed. Then he hit upon the notion of translating Shakespeare and Ibsen into the form of the cheapest, most sensational melodrama, and made a fortune for himself and his managers. Owen Davis, the only man able to exceed Kramer in the extravagance of weird and fearsome concoctions, is a Harvard man whose leisure enjoyments are those of the scholar. Both of these men made a careful study of the people to whom they determined to make an appeal. When they gained insight into their mental or emotional processes, they were sure of the success of their lutescent dramas.

It is significant that these makers of plays realized long before the manager who made a fortune in producing them that their vogue must be ephemeral, that the public to which they appealed would outgrow them. When the profits began to dwindle, the managers redoubled their efforts for frenzied sensations, which tided them over for a while. Then, with a surprising suddenness, the melodrama public revolted completely, and within a space of two weeks fourteen companies were closed.

Straightway the dictum was accepted that the public was tired of melodrama, when, as a matter of fact, it was disgusted with the sensationalism, the exaggeration, the flamboyancy, of the form of melodrama which it enjoyed before it was wise enough to know better.

To those who present our plays for us to see and hear, eternal forms-melodrama, farce, problem drama, comedy-are everything. The manager measures what the public wants by these forms and the box office receipts. The financial returns are an accurate measure for a particular play that happens to be a success, but it is not a safe guide for future productions unless there is clear realization of the ideas and the qualities that made it pay. And because so little intelligent attention is paid to this important thing most of the productions are failures.

It is true with regard to the theater, as it is with everything else that has to do with amusement, the public is fickle, it likes novelty and fresh sensations. Apparently it runs from one extreme to the other, but all the

while there is a constant change for the better. Theater audiences are growing more exacting, more discriminating, and therefore more intelligent. The manager realizes this chiefly on the physical side. Scenery, costumes, and properties-everything costs from five to ten times as much as it did a quarter of a century ago. There is a corresponding advance in the refinement of ideas and emotions. Somehow that does not seem SO easily grasped, but in a dim, uncertain way it seems to be understood that love, truth, justice, and laughter are as popular as ever they were.

The audience is governed always by very natural laws, some of which are easily understood, in fact can be formulated, although probably no especially useful purpose would be accomplished thereby.

About the first important thing to bear in mind is that a truly good play is unreal, as unreal as the stage sunlight, the perspective, the acting. Mentally and emotionally, the audience is just as unreal as the play.

The thing most necessary to avoid on the stage is truth. The most essential thing is the effect of truth. The loveliest moonlight stage effect ever devised would be ruined if it were illuminated by the real moon even at her brightest. The most polished and effective stage manners, the most brilliant dialogue, would be absurd in a real drawing-room.

The normal audience enters the theater in a receptive mood. It is prepared, without an individual consciousness of the fact, to have its emotions stirred by intelligent exaggeration. We who are the audience are swiftly or slowly led into an exaggerated expression of our real selves. We have a loftier sense of virtue, vastly quickened sympathies, more bitter resentment, a livelier capacity for laughter, an infinitely broader charity than we know in our daily lives.

Probably the dominant characteristic is an overpowering love for vicarious virtue, which we demand of the characters (and in a good play the audience plays every one of the sympathetic characters), a demand for an exalted goodness, a generous kindliness, a capacity for unlimited self-sacrifice, a brilliancy of intellect, an uncanny cleverness, that few of us would ever be capable of in our own existence.

We are borne on the wings of imagination, which the play has given us, to an ideal land where we can live up to the best that

is in us. When the play itself, or when the characters in the play, fall below the standard we have set, our interest departs and another failure is recorded.

By far the cleverest play ever written by George Ade was "The Good Samaritan." His satire was never more brilliant nor keener-edged, his fun never more spontaneous, his humor never more significant, while the characterization was the most faithful of all. The manager and his staff were in ecstasies over the comedy. Yet it was doomed to failure, as at least one man pointed out. The objector admitted that the lines and the situations deserved all the praise bestowed upon them. But he insisted that "The Good Samaritan" must fail, for a very simple, definite reason.

Its theme was ingratitude. The kindliness, the generosity, the goodness, of the hero were played upon and abused. That is not comedy, but tragedy. The most riotous fun, the keenest intellectual wit, the liveliest situations, could make it nothing else. The audience left the theater feeling abused and miserable. As I remember, "The Good Samaritan" lasted two weeks.

Ingratitude is either despicable or tragic. No human being can make it humorous. On the stage it is possible only as tragedy. I doubt if any one great enough to handle such a theme would venture to try to rival " King Lear."

Often there are two or three scenes in a play that may make it miss real success or that even ruin it. Two or three seasons ago a drama with the newspaper for its background, "The Fourth Estate," alternately provoked enthusiasm and caused disappointment. It is true that the original last act was absurd and the substituted one ridiculous, but that did not account for the laxity of interest in the preceding ones.

In a scene or a succession of scenes the authors would inspire affection or admiration for the hero, and then they would straightway destroy it, apparently without the least consciousness of what they were doing. The most serious error, and it proved almost fatal to the play, came in a clash between the villain, who was a judge of a Federal court, and the newspaper hero. The audience was told time and time again of the crookedness of this judge, but there was no real proof in evidence. Furthermore, Charles Stevenson, the actor who played the part, carried himself with such ease, with such fine dignity, with such an

air of breeding, that the audience could not help but respect him.

When the hero, struck by a sudden idea, suggests to the judge that he is willing to be bribed, the audience straightway turns a swiftly chilled shoulder towards the hero. The fact that the newspaper man was influenced by what he considered admirable motives didn't appeal to the audience. The act itself was dishonorable and unfair. And from that time on interest in .the play itself waned because of the inarticulate resentment towards the hero.

There is no reason in the world why the first suggestion of bribery should not have come from the judge. From a dramatic view-point that was the only way. It would have shown the dishonesty of the judge and turned sympathy from him. The momentary anger of the hero over the suggestion that he could have been bribed would have increased respect for his high-mindedness, and the idea that this proposal offered an opportunity to trap the judge would have moved the audience to greater admiration for the newspaper man's cleverness.

As the play was presented, in the big scene that followed, where a cunning arrangement enabled the journalist to make a flashlight of the judge handing over the bribe money, most of the sympathy was with the judge, and the act lost much of its dramatic value.

It can be accepted as axiomatic that when an audience loses a hero or a heroine the manager and the author lose a play.

The best drama ever written by Rachel Crothers, up to a certain point, was "The Coming of Mrs. Patrick." She had a fine idea, that of a trained nurse entering a household rapidly disintegrating because of the chronic illness of the wife and mother. The mission of the nurse was to make the home and the people in it normal and happy.

A man who read the manuscript before the play was produced bubbled over with enthusiasm. Miss Crothers has a gift for dialogue that no other American dramatist can surpass, and marvelous skill in characterization. Until the latter part of the second act the reader praised extravagantly. Then came a scene that lasted perhaps five minutes.

"Your play will fail," he said, "unless that scene is changed. Up to this point the people in the audience will be prisoners of the play. When this scene is developed, they will sink back in their seats. You will hear