There is more hope to the American stage in the future in the production of such undeniably original if mechanically faulty plays as Bret Harte has given us in the "Two Men of Sandy Bar," than in the rapid carpentry and skilful patchwork of hosts of French adaptations, whether they run ten or five hundred nights. Our Hartes and our yet unknown writers daily coming to the front, with freshness in their hearts and brains in their heads, lack only technique and the custom of the stage, which no one can give them but the managers and actors, who shall welcome them as apprentices to learn the trade. That these latter will find it to their advantage in the end to encourage a cordial alliance between the men of the quill and the men of the sock and buskin, follows from a simple calculation. If men of confessedly small talent and low character, such as the host of lesser playwrights who furnish pabulum for the outlying theatres, can write fair acting plays, simply by using mechanical knowledge and stolen materials, it is probable that men of original talent, already experienced writers in other branches of literature, will end by producing much better and fresher work, when they are offered and have enjoyed the same technical advantages. FREDERICK WHITTAKER. AN EVENING PARTY AMONG THE COSSACKS OF THE DON. Sunset on the Lower Don; a dim waste of gray, unending steppe, looking vaster and drearier than ever under the fast falling shadows of night; a red gleam far away to the west, falling luridly across the darkening sky and the ghostly prairie; a dead, grim silence, broken only by the plash and welter of our laboring steamer, or the shrill cry of some passing bird; an immense, crushing loneliness--the solitude not of a region whence life has died out, but of one where it has never existed. Even my three comrades, hardened as they are to all such influences, appear somewhat impressed by the scene. "Cheerful place, ain't it?" says Sinbad, the traveller; "and the whole of southern Russia is just the same style--multiply a billiard board by five million, and subtract the cushions!" "I wonder what the population of this district can be," muses Allfact, the statistician, looking disconsolately at his unfilled note-book. "It's almost impossible to get any reliable information in these parts. But I should think one man to three square miles must be about the proportion." "And not a feather of game in the whole shop!" growls Smoothbore, the sportsman, with an indignant glance at his pet double barrel. "It's as bad as that desert where the old sportsman committed suicide, leaving a letter beside him to the effect that he must be firing at something, and there being nothing else to shoot, he had shot himself!"