Goodwin also appealed to us to modify the entrance of Silas K. Woolcott, the American who had gone to England to sell a gold mine. “That entrance is all right in itself,” he explained; “and it was all right for Raymond, because he had played parts of that kind before. But I haven’t; and it’s too quiet for me, since they’ll be disappointed if I don’t make them laugh with my first half-dozen speeches.” So we brought Woolcott in through the conservatory, instead of through the front door, and we contrived a very brief episode of equivoke in which Goodwin mistook the butler for a certain Sir Thomas Butler whom Woolcott had been invited to meet. ‘A Gold Mine’ was a more or less artificial comedy with a complicated plot and with dialog as brilliant as the combined wits of the two collaborators could compass. For the part of the fascinating widow with whom Woolcott was to pair off at the end of the play Goodwin engaged Kate Forsythe; and the rest of the cast was at least adequate if not entirely satisfactory. McCarty of the Boston Theater produced the play most judiciously, making a valuable suggestion for heightening the effect of the pathetic speech at the end of the second act. When we asked Goodwin if he was certain that he could play this serious bit and carry the audience with him, the actor answered modestly, “Yes—at least I think so. You see, I’m going to do it in imitation of Charley Thorne.” This was shrewd, as Charles R. Thorne, Jr., was an actor of straightforward force with a rich and well-modulated voice. It is profitable always for the novice in any calling to take pattern by its experts. As the painter studies in the studio of another craftsman and as the writer “plays the sedulous ape to many masters,” so the actor can find his profit in imitating and emulating the performances of an earlier generation, not making himself a slave to any one of them but gaining variety and flexibility by capturing and combining the methods of half-a-dozen. John Drew, for example, played one of his earliest parts at Daly’s as he imagined it would have been played by Charles Wyndham; and Wyndham had modelled himself more or less on Lester Wallack as Wallack had earlier sought to achieve the airy lightness of Charles James Matthews. I make this assertion without misgiving as my information came directly from these four comedians; and I may add that Coquelin, the most varied and versatile actor of the end of the nineteenth century, once told me that while he was a pupil of Regnier, he learnt almost as much by incessant observation of Samson, an older artist with a method wholly different from Regnier’s.