the village pastor, but more because _May_ has realized that she truly loves him, and because the inevitable action of time has dissipated her resentment of a wrong. The analyzer of the drama that tells this story perceives in it a constructive mind that is imaginative, romantic, and eccentric, an ardently vehement faculty of expression, and a nimble fancy intent on devising pictorial and pathetic situations, while often heedless of probability--sometimes even of possibility. Things happen not because they would, in actual life, so happen, under the pressure of circumstances, but because the dramatist ordains them to occur, to suit his necessity. Experience has taught the indiscretion of declaring that _anything_ is _impossible_, but it is at least highly improbable that a good man would, in any circumstances, break a promise solemnly made to a friend whom he believed was about to die. _Harland_ is depicted as a gentleman and one of deep feeling. _Ashcroft’s_ death, if _Harland_ considers it to be inevitable, would at once relieve him of any need to break his promise, even if he had been ever so strongly tempted to do so: doubt of _Ashcroft’s_ death would inspire far more poignant remorse and fear than _Harland_ actually denotes. _May Blossom_, furthermore, would not have omitted to inquire, with far more insistence than she is represented to have shown, into the disappearance of the lover to whom she is betrothed. _Ashcroft_, though a prisoner, would have been permitted to communicate with his friends, since at his trial nothing was proved against him,--yet he was still held in captivity. It is questionable whether the manly _Harland_, a thoroughly good fellow, would have married _May Blossom_, however much he might have loved her, knowing that she loved another man. It is more than questionable whether _May_, having married _Harland_ and borne a child to him, would have repudiated her husband, would have acquiesced in his parting from her and their child, because of the particular wrong that he had done in breaking his promise to _Ashcroft_. The sin that a man commits out of the uncontrollable love that he feels for a woman is, of all sins, the one that she is readiest to forgive. The likelihood that _May Blossom_, loving _Ashcroft_, betrothed to him and mourning for him, would, after the lapse of so short a time as one year, have married anybody is, likewise, open to doubt. Belasco, however, was bent on devising situations, and he accomplished his purpose: grant his premises (as a theatrical audience, in the presence of a competent performance of this play, almost invariably will do), and his dramatic fabric captivates entire sympathy.