_Adam Butterworth_ C. B. Bishop. _Lieut. Hugh Butterworth_ Frank Carlyle. _Gasper Le Sage_ Herbert Archer. _Tommy Tucker_ Rowland Buckstone. _Blink Bank_ George Backus. _Winterbottom_ A. W. Gregory. _Eleanor_ Belle Archer. _Jessie Deane_ Dora Leslie. _Lady Alexander Barker_ Fannie Addison. _Meg_ Etta Hawkins. _Miranda_ Rosa Stark. _Lord George Cholmondeley_ (_known as “Chumley”_) E. H. Sothern. “THE KAFFIR DIAMOND.” In the period from August 21, 1888, to November 19, 1889, Belasco’s labors were many and various. As soon as “Lord Chumley” had been produced, and while yet he was engaged, as customary with him, in smoothing and improving that new venture, he began work, for Louis Aldrich, on revision of a play by Edward J. Swartz, called “The Kaffir Diamond,” which had been written for Aldrich, as a starring vehicle. That play is a wild and whirling kaleidoscopic melodrama, devised for the pleasure of those theatre-goers who seek entertainment in extravagant situations and violent, tumultuous actions,--a play of the class typified by “The Gambler’s Fate; or, The Doomed House,” “The Lonely Man of the Ocean,” “The King of the Opium Ring,” etc.,--and Belasco’s work on it must have caused him to remember, perhaps with amusement, his fabrication of many similar “shockers,” in his early San Francisco and Virginia City days. The central character of “The Kaffir Diamond,” a person named _Shoulders_, is a misanthropical drunkard, made so by suffering, who inhabits a miasmatic swamp, in Africa, subsisting largely on liquor and the hope of revenge. This person believes himself to have been robbed, in days of prosperity, of wife and daughter, by a _Colonel_ in the British Army, and, in seeking for revenge, he nearly effects the ruin of a woman who proves to be his long-lost daughter, and he succeeds in confining the detested _Colonel_ in the poisonous swamp, where he intends that he shall miserably perish, only to discover that, instead of being his wronger, that gallant soldier is his best friend. Blended with this plot, or, rather, tangled into it, is a double-barrelled love story, the theft of a diamond of priceless worth, and a medley of incidents incorporative of brawling, lynching, and miscellaneous riot. Aldrich, as _Shoulders_, personated in a surprisingly simple manner the wretched victim of weak character, strong drink, misfortune, and mistaken enmity, giving a performance which, while devoid of imaginative quality, was nevertheless effective, because of the innate sturdy manliness of the actor and of his artistically