people who wish any play revised as they would have written it. There are carping critics; there are the romanticists who cannot appreciate realism and the equally uncompromising realists. Above all, there are the moralists who can see no justification for treating any subject conventionally held to be unsavory. But as all these people will be present in any large audience in a professional theater, their comments must be thoughtfully considered. The author, when the papers are handed to him, is to read them as impersonally as he can, and uncombatively. After a first rapid examination, he is to put them away for a week, not trying to formulate opinions as he reads or immediately thereafter. In a week or ten days he is to re-read the comments more carefully, and note whether they have not already shaped in his mind opinions as to where the play failed-in clearness, emphasis, characterization, climax, or convincingness as a whole. Then he is ready for consultation with the director as to rewriting. No time is set for completing this revision. According to the difficulty of the problems to be met, it may take weeks or months.

What happens to the play when revised? If a producer or play-placer, after watching it in performance, has not asked to see it when revised, the author may send it to some producing group. This happened when the Washington Square Players took Edward Massey's "Plots and Playwrights," after its production and consequent rewriting in the Workshop. If a short play, it may, like eight already published, go into a volume of Workshop plays, and be given frequently in schools, colleges, settlement houses, by amateur clubs and experimental theaters. From these books a play may even go into vaudeville, as has been the case with Eugene Pillot's "Two Crooks and a Lady." Short plays not included in these volumes and long plays not successful in finding professional production may, if approved by the Workshop directorate, be sent out in manuscript for royalty performances. Any promising long play not placed earlier is sure to go into the annual prize contest on October 1. The Craig Prize, offered by

Mr. John Craig of the Castle Square Theatre, Boston, as an experiment sure to aid the work at Harvard and a possible good business venture, had unexpected success. For five years, until just before the United States entered the war, the contest produced a play which ran from five to twelve weeks at the Castle Square Theatre. Of these Mr. Ballard's "Believe Me, Xantippe," Miss Lincoln's "The End of the Bridge," and Mr. Kinkead's "Common Clay" had professional production elsewhere. In 1919 Mr. Oliver Morosco established a prize for past and present students of English 47 and English 47a who had not yet had professional production. "Mama's Affair," first produced in the Workshop, and afterward revised in the light of the written criticisms of its audience, won the prize, had a season of three or four months in New York, and is now on the road. Three other plays entered in the competition were taken by Mr. Morosco. One of them, Miss Hinkley's "The Clam-Digger," has been tried out in Los Angeles, and is to be given on Broadway this coming season. Its author has had one short play and one long play tried out in the Workshop. Each of the other successful competitors had had work produced in the Agassiz Theatre.

There are, then, three stages in the Workshop for the would-be dramatist. The first year goes into general technic. Each member of English 47 is expected to acquaint himself fully with all the methods of the Workshop and to share, as far as his capacities permit, in any opportunity it offers. This first year may bring production of a one-act play at Agassiz House or, in very rare instances, of a longer piece; but members of English 47 should not be disappointed if the time means only a better grasp on what they want to do and how they may do it. Writing worthy of production will far more probably come in English 47a, the second year. The director, on his side, in English 47 tries to distinguish the members who can be happy only when writing plays from those who are as much interested in other forms of writing. He believes that the second group should be urged to devote themselves to these other forms. Among

those who feel that they must write plays he tries to discover any special gift, any growing individuality. When he finds this, he readily admits the student to English 47a. Knowing from experience, however, that latent power reveals itself very slowly, he uses his discretion in giving a second chance to some of those who in the first year have done little more than prove the absorbing interest writing plays has for them. In English 47a he aims to give the student of individual promise every opportunity to develop, and to the others a chance to release and reveal any power latent thus far. He never collaborates. He does not force his own ideas or solutions on the worker. The great desideratum is to train the would-be playwright to intelligent scrutiny of his work and independent solution of his problems.

If it be said that all this work is possible only for him or her who can afford the necessary tuition, the MacDowell Club of New York City meets this difficulty with its fellowship, named in honor of Edward MacDowell. It grants, on the basis of a competition, to an unmarried man or woman a sum of money sufficient for one year at Harvard or Radcliffe. Annually on the first of June competitors submit an original prose play of three or more acts. The first holder of this fellowship was Fennimore Merrill, whose one-act play, "The Shop Window," produced by the Washington Square Players, gave promise of fine satirical comedy later. Mr. Hubert Osborne, whose "Shore Leave" was recently successfully tried out in Toronto by Mr. Belasco, held this appointment. So, too, did Miss Butler, author of the successful play in the recent Morosco competition. A play of Mr. Merrill's was the first given by the Workshop; Mr. Osborne had two one-act plays produced by it; and Miss Butler, "Mama's Affair" and a second long play.

There remains a third stage in the

development of a Workshop playwright. The Workshop likes to keep up relations with its authors after they leave the classes. It welcomes them back to its productions. The director urges them, when they have writing to do, to come to Cambridge for it. This is not for consultation, but rather that they may work under congenial conditions. In one way he still stands ready to aid the playwright in this stage. If he is not overpressed with material from the courses, he will produce promising plays of theirs which they feel need such criticism as the Workshop audience provides. Of course such production is not open to graduates of the courses who win professional recognition.

As to such instruction as the Workshop offers, the attitude of a considerable part of the public is amusingly contradictory. Very dubious at first whether any courses in play-writing will be of real practical use if they are successful, this part of the public makes a complete face-about. It now demands correspondence courses, instruction in the whole subject in a summer school of six weeks, text-books that, with one reading, will put a would-be playwright on Broadway-a dozen absurdities or impossibilities. There can be no patent pellets for would-be playwrights. No one in the Workshop is encouraged to expect professional production while in the courses or immediately thereafter. One of the first ideas inculcated is that a dramatist must make haste slowly. Work, hard, self-scrutinizing work, sustained for a long period in the face of many discouragements through sheer love of that work-this, granted some natural gift for dramatic writing, is the great essential. No one, no system, can create a dramatist. No one can help him as much as himself. But the difficult road may be shortened for him, and, above all, he may be helped to help himself. That is all the 47 Workshop tries to do.

S there any better place than London on a fine May morning, and is there any better spot in it than a tuppenny seat looking out on the Row? If there is, I have yet to find it. You sit at your ease and watch the world go by, and sometimes -almost always-there arrives a friend that you have lost, the ending of a story, or the beginnings of a new one. It is Vignolles who has set me going and who has brought about these cursory reflections. Without that seat, without the Row and London on a fine May morning, I should never have known what had become of the old fellow after that last day we spent together.

At the depot, and subsequently, I had come to look on him as one of the lost ones, as one of the many who have vanished. They are so many that one more or less makes little mark. But there were circumstances about his disappearance not altogether creditable; in fact, Vignolles went to Port Said next morning, he had begged a whole day's leave, and after that we had no trace of him. Some said he was a deserter, just an ordinary deserter, and that, perhaps, he had got aboard a neutral ship and cleared out of it. The Camel Transport Corps is n't exactly an alluring proposition. But there were others, and, indeed, the most of us,for the old chap had n't an enemy,who were pretty certain that Vignolles had reached Port Said all right and then come some sort of cropper in Arab Town, the festive quarter. After these months in the desert, it seemed more than likely. Knocked on the head or knifed or even poisoned; the drink they sell has little relation to the label. He may have turned quarrelsome after a dose of it, and in one way and another he had a good deal of money on him. But

here was the man himself, bronzed, lean, and as gray as ever; rather grayer, for he had dyed his hair to get into the war. A man who does that is n't likely to funk it, to run away or stow away aboard a neutral boat and clear right out of it.

I had always stuck up for him and was ready to take my oath he had played the game, so I had no hesitation, when at last he came strolling by, you will remember I was sitting on a tuppenny seat in the park that fine May morning, -I had n't the least hesitation in getting up with rather a shout of welcome; and he, apparently, was just as glad to see me again. He had few friends in London; he had no engagements. We finished that day together, and after that there were other meetings; and now, once in a blue moon, he writes to

me.

The last day we had spent together had happened a few years before that; in 1917, to be exact. Yes, in the autumn. One remembers it specially, for it was after Allenby took hold, and Murray went home with our sincere good wishes; it was before we broke the Turk and pushed up to Jerusalem. Vignolles was in all that, but I was n't; and I have put his story in one piece, though I dare say he told it to me in several; and perhaps I've filled in gaps and dwelt a little on the peculiar characteristics of the man. For he is a character, rather a rare one, rather of the romantic sort, one of those persistent children of unrest who give our ordinary life and standards the goby and venture on a world tour of their

own.

He was a man past fifty and had always been in the thick of it. That, I imagine, was his passion, the ruling motive of his life. Most people, therefore, would call him an adventurer; the war threw up many such. They flocked home from all the corners of the

was one of them, the only one, however, whom I knew with any intimacy. He had the two South African ribbons, he had a Japanese, he would have had a Bulgarian, only just now they were the enemy, and he had others besides. He bore no ill will whatsoever toward any of his numerous adversaries; indeed, like many of his kind, he often expressed a peculiar horror and detestation of war, of its cruelties, its injustice, its brutalities, though, somehow, he could n't keep away from it. He had abandoned a rubber-growing proposition farther East to be in this one. He had sailed all the way to London, and there he had been refused at the first asking; and then he had returned to his hotel, had dyed his hair, which was prematurely gray, and gone back with a decent lie that made him eligible. He had come to us of the Camel Transport Corps by way of the yeomanry, and he and Iwe were both "old stiffs," though for the nonce disguised as subalterns-had struck up a friendship that was quick and intimate, and salted with our mutual joy in the adjutant, our lord and master, and young enough for either of us to have dandled on a paternal knee.

But to return to that last day, the day before he disappeared. We had risen at dawn as usual, we had been on parade by six, and then had ridden off to exercise our sections. After breakfast, when the camels had been scraped and cleaned and cleared of ticks, we were to lead them out to the water-troughs. One fed twice a day, but one watered only every other day, and the jaunt was always a bit of an excursion. Here in London it seemed romantic, and to a tourist watching us it would have looked like something wonderfully picturesque. I can hear the click of his camera and his expressions of delight as we came by. But had he been one of us, he might have made a different song of it.

There was the depot, naked in the sunlight, with its two wooden huts for offices, its long rows of tents, and its longer rows of camel lines, all beautifully laid out in the marshy land on the African side of the canal. Brown and baked it was, very much like Vignolles, before it joined the reed-beds and the water.

healthy life, spent mostly by us on our Arab ponies; but after sundown, to the flies were added the mosquitos, and to the mosquitos, the sand-flies. The mosquitos were the fiercest and the most voracious I have ever known. They would eat through your drill riding-breeches, they would sting through your flannel shirt. If you played a rubber of auction after mess, you kept one eye on your cards and another on them; and when at nine or ten you went to bed, diving with all speed under your mosquito net, in they came after you. Once inside, you lit a candle and hunted them, and when all seemed secure, you went to sleep. But somehow or other they would evade you, and when you scratched the places they made, you risked a septic sore.

At sunrise, however, all would be well again, and Vignolles and I, and such other subalterns as were awaiting orders here, would meet upon parade. One day's ritual was very like another, except that on every other day we watered. And then all the camels, four or five hundred of them, would march out in a long line, two by two, with an Egyptian driver to each pair. These men wore bright blue gowns-galabiahs, they call them of the same color as the eternal blue of the sky; the camels, and Vignolles and I in khaki, were of the color of the desert; and when the whole line of us stood out in silhouette against those spacious horizons, like a frieze of blue-brown on a blue-brown background, we made a most wonderful picture. This is where the tourist would have come in with his camera.

The last morning Vignolles was peculiarly silent as we rode on together; for, out of the depot, we usually left the men and camels to their reises and bash-reises and enjoyed our freedom and the soft, clear air. the soft, clear air. Sometimes, quite frankly, we played the ass, putting our ponies at any obstacle we met, a jump or a hillock, or racing the little beggars over broken ground. But that day Vignolles was absent and moody, so much so that at last I asked him what was up. "You and I are getting shot out; too old," he answered. "I had it from Goffin,