there thinking it all over I realized that the shadows were beginning to slant toward the east--and suddenly I decided that if ‘Charlie’ should die without our being reconciled it should not be my fault. I started to write a little note to him but got no further than ‘Dear Charlie’ when my telephone-bell rang. The caller was Roeder--and the first thing he said was: ‘I’ve just had a telephone message from Charles Frohman. He wants to see you’! We met that night, in his rooms, and forgot that we ever had a disagreement.” Soon after that reconciliation Belasco held a little festival in honor of Frohman, in his theatre-studio, and there, at first in jest, it was proposed that they should make a joint revival of some notably successful play of earlier days. This proposal led to a serious discussion and eventually to an agreement whereby the two managers covenanted to make a joint production every season during a term of years. At Frohman’s request Belasco agreed to choose the first play to be presented by them, and his election fell upon “A Celebrated Case.” That play (first produced in America at the Union Square Theatre, New York, January 23, 1878) is a melodrama in six acts, translated, in rough English, from the French of Adolphe D’Ennery (1811-1899) and Eugène Cormon (18--- 18--). It presents the image of a murder which was done in France, on the eve of the Battle of Fontenoy (May 11, 1745), and for which an innocent man was made to suffer years of cruel punishment, till, at last, in a mysterious and circuitous way, it was brought home to its perpetrator. The circumstances of the crime are peculiarly hideous and the circumstances of the belated retribution are peculiarly complex. The innocent man, _Jean Renaud_, is condemned, for the murder of his wife, on the testimony of their child. _Lazare_, the guilty man (as in many other fictions on this antiquated pattern), assumes the identity of another person connected with the crime, the _Count de Mornay_, and, after various escapes from exposure and much suspense, he is baffled in his maintenance of the assumed identity and is brought to justice. The parting of the condemned father with his innocent, prattling child, who has unconsciously convicted him of murder, and their meeting in after years, he a wretched galley-slave and she a young woman, afford a poignantly affecting contrast. Adroit use, likewise, is made of a certain singular jewel as the instrument for discovery of the actual criminal. Although there are no remarkable characters in the piece and nothing extraordinary in its dialogue, it possesses substantial dramatic merit in its occasional scenes of acute agony, relieved by the violent action of natures taxed beyond endurance. Its sentiment, moreover,--that of filial affection,--is pure; and in its complication of the lives and the emotional troubles of two young girls it deals skilfully and tenderly with difficult and lovely themes. Its