After many vicissitudes all the manuscripts usually come home to their parents, who do not repeat their experiments, but, looking back on their dead ambition, shake their heads with an air of great sagacity when play-writing is mentioned and point ominously to a pile of leaves in some corner of their desks. Years ago, when we told a literary veteran who had written tragedies and other trifles for the Bowery in its palmy days that we were engaged upon a drama of our own, he vehemently protested against the folly. "Don't do it!" he cried. "They will tear your heart out," referring to the managers, who certainly deserve small credit for the way they treat the literary men who submit work to them. Nevertheless, in all the leading theatres there is in some part of the building an office, usually undiscoverable by the uninitiated, where plays are actually read and sometimes accepted. It is a small apartment guarded by an attendant, who instinctively knows to whom the manager is "at home" and to whom he is not--who has a welcoming smile for the critic of the big newspaper and an impatient shrug of disparagement for the author who calls for the twentieth time to see if his play has been read. There is a bunch of programmes hanging from a nail in the wall, and there are proofs of lithographic window-sheets and posters strewn upon the desks and chairs. The newspapers are filed, and copies of the latest editions are so profuse that the effect is more journalistic than theatrical. But the conversation is assiduously "professional," and there is a somewhat unusual familiarity of address among the persons present, who call one another by their Christian names. Sometimes an actor or actress attached to the theatre looks in, or a playwright who is in favor, or a provincial manager, or a fashionable "man about town" who in some occult way has obtained the _entrée_ of the managerial sanctum. It strikes one that for an overburdened business-man the manager is very affable and patient. This is only during his moments of leisure, however, and when a play has to be discussed, the characters to be "cast" or engagements to be made none but members of the staff are admitted.