William A. Brady was the first to give me a regular Broadway production with a first class company and in doing so, although he little knew it at the time, he started an association that lasted for many years. Mr. Brady is a strong man and had he been able to foresee what was in store for him the day on which we signed our first contract, it is highly probable these confessions would never have been written. With great confidence, however, Mr. Brady commanded me to write him a big melodrama and as a result Doris Keane and William Courtney appeared in a direful thing called MAKING GOOD. The title of this play turned out to be a god-send to the New York critics and if I had put as much wit into my play as they put into their slaughter of it, Mr. Brady and I would have been happier even if they had been deprived of a great pleasure. As a matter of fact, I should be a very popular man with the critics. Several of them owe their standing as humorists almost entirely to me and at least one of the finest of them, Frank O’Malley, won his place in the ranks of humorists over my dead body. In later years Mr. O’Malley confided to me that he often journeyed miles to get to a play of mine, a compliment that at the time I quite failed to value at its true worth. Twenty-four hours after the first New York production of MAKING GOOD I was safely hidden in the country with my still loyal wife and two small sons, luckily at the time too young to know their shame. At once I started out, quite undismayed, to write another. One old habit that still clings to me: if I have a failure, to sit down at my desk before I have so much as slept on it, and write at least part of the next one; as a matter of fact, most of the good plays I have written have been started at such a time. Here then, in the wilds of Westchester, I stuck to it until I finished THE FAMILY CUPBOARD, much the best thing I had done up to then, and a play that might very well be a success if produced to-day. The manuscript of this play I sent at once to a play-broker with instructions to offer it for production with no author’s name on the manuscript. A few days later the broker called me up with the startling information that he had sold my play to William A. Brady—rather dread news as, following what the New York critics had said about MAKING GOOD, Mr. Brady had thrown me out of his office and practically forbidden me its sacred ground. It seemed, so my broker said, that Mr. Brady had paid good money for an option on the play and was very curious as to the identity of the modest author. When he learned it, he had something very like a stroke, but in time he forgave me.