_Terry Dennison_ James A. Herne. _Ruby Darrell_ Harry Mainhall. _Uncle Davy_ William H. Crompton. _Mr. Ellingham_ J. W. Dean. _Owen Garroway_ H. M. Brown. _Foreman of the Mill_ J. S. Andrews. _Clerk of the Mill_ William Lawrence. _Will Barton_ Lillie Hamilton. _Chrystal_ Katherine Corcoran. _Aunt Betsy_ Henrietta Bert Osborne. _Little Chrystal_ Alice Hamilton. _Tawdrey_ Dollie Hamilton. _Mr. Parker_ Mr. Harvey. _Tom_ J. Sherman. _Sleuth_ T. Gossman. _The Baby_ Herself. JAMES ALFRED HERNE. James Alfred Herne (1839-1901) has been incorrectly and injudiciously vaunted as a great, original, representative American dramatist. The claim is preposterous. Herne was not a dramatist, he was a playwright (that is, a mechanic, a _maker_ of plays, mechanically, from stock material, precisely as a wheelwright is a maker of wheels), and as a playwright he was less distinctive than as an actor. He adopted the latter vocation in youth, first as an amateur, then as a member of a stock company, making his first professional appearance at a theatre in Troy, New York. He obtained good training. He participated in performances of standard plays with some of the best actors who have graced the American Stage,--among them James Booth Roberts (1818-1901), Edward Loomis Davenport (1815-1877), and the younger James William Wallack (1818-1873). He did not possess a tithe of the power and versatility of Davenport, but he was deeply affected by the influence of that noble actor, and he played several parts in close imitation of him,--notably _Sikes_, in “Oliver Twist.” His dramatic instinct was keen, but his mind was not imaginative and the natural bent of it was toward prosy literalism. He was early, strongly, and continuously dominated by the literal methods and the humanitarian and reformatory spirit of the novels of Dickens. He liked the utilitarian and matter-of-fact embellishments with which some of those novels abound, and he was attracted by such characters as _Peggotty_, a part which he acted and of which his performance was creditable. As an actor he aimed to be photographic, he copied actual life in commonplace aspects as closely as he could, and often he was slow, dull, and tedious. As a playwright he was deficient in the faculty of invention and in the originality of characterization. He tinkered the plays of other writers, always with a view to the enhancement or introduction of graphic situations. The principal plays with which his name is associated are “Hearts of Oak,” “Drifting Apart,” “Sag Harbor,” “Margaret Fleming,” “Shore Acres,” and “The Rev. Griffith Davenport.” “Hearts of Oak” is Belasco’s revamp of “The Mariner’s Compass,” modified and expanded. The characters in it are not American: they are transformed English characters.