It was not Herne’s plan, it was Belasco’s, to rehabilitate the earlier play by Leslie, shift the places of the action, shuffle the scenes, change the names of the persons, introduce incidents from other plays, add unusual “stage effects,” and so manufacture something that might pass for a novelty. In reply to a question of mine as to Herne’s share in the making of “Hearts of Oak,” Belasco said “he did _a lot of good work_ on it,” and when I asked for specification of that work I was told “he introduced a lot of _Rip Van Winkle_ stuff.” “Drifting Apart” is based on an earlier play, called “Mary, the Fisherman’s Daughter.” “Sag Harbor” is a variant of “Hearts of Oak.” “Margaret Fleming” is mainly the work of Mrs. Herne, and is one of those crude and completely ineffectual pieces of hysterical didacticism which are from time to time produced on the stage with a view to the dismay of libertines by an exhibition of some of the evil consequences of licentious conduct. In that play a righteously offended wife bares her bosom to the public gaze in order to suckle a famished infant, of which her dissolute husband is the father by a young woman whom he has seduced, betrayed, and abandoned to want and misery: libertines, of course, are always reformed by spectacles of that kind! (This incident, by the way, occurs, under other circumstances, in the fourth chapter of “Hide and Seek,” by Wilkie Collins, published in 1854.) “The Rev. Griffith Davenport” was deduced from a novel called “The Unofficial Patriot,” by Helen H. Gardner. “Shore Acres” is, in its one vital dramatic ingredient, derived from a play by Frank Murdoch, called “The Keepers of Lighthouse Cliff,”--in which Herne had acted years before “Shore Acres” was written. It incorporates, also, many of the real stage properties and much of the stage business,--the real supper, etc.,--used in “Hearts of Oak.” Its climax is the quarrel of the brothers _Martin_ and _Nathan’l Berry_, the suddenly illumined beacon, kindled by _Uncle Nat_, and the hairbreadth escape of the imperilled ship,--taken, without credit, from Murdoch’s drama. Herne localized his plays in America and, to a certain extent, treated American subjects, but he made no addition to American Drama, and his treatment of the material that he “borrowed” or adapted never rose above respectable mediocrity. It was as an actor that he gained repute and merited commemoration. He was early impressed by the example of Joseph Jefferson and was emulative of him: he appeared in Jefferson’s most famous character, _Rip Van Winkle_, but he did not evince a particle of that innate charm, that imaginative, spiritual quality, which irradiated Jefferson’s impersonation of the pictorial vagabond and exalted it into the realm of the poetic ideal. Herne earnestly wished for a part in which he might win a popularity and opulence in some degree commensurate with those obtained by Jefferson as _Rip Van Winkle_: he eventually found it, or something like it, in _Terry