Supreme dramatic effects are, as a rule, produced in the Theatre as results of patient, prescient labor, using known, definite means to definite foreordained ends,--as, for example, in such perfect histrionic epitomes as _Shylock’s_ return through the lonely midnight streets to his deserted dwelling, as arranged by Irving; the momentary shuddering horror of Mansfield’s _King Richard the Third_, when, alone, in the dusk, seated upon the throne to which he has made his way by murder, he sees his hand bathed blood-red in a seemingly chance-thrown beam of light; the exquisitely poetic and lovely scene of the serenade, in “Twelfth Night,” invented by Daly, in which the theme of the comedy is pictured without a word; or the long, dreary vigil of _Madame Butterfly_, waiting [Illustration: Photograph by Livingston Platt. Belasco’s Collection. GEORGE ARLISS AS _ZAKKURI_, _THE MINISTER OF WAR_, IN “THE DARLING OF THE GODS”] through the night for her recreant lover, devised by Belasco. Sometimes, however, even the most resourceful of stage managers, though possessed of perfectly clear purpose, find themselves baffled and balked in every endeavor to embody a picture in action and create a designed effect: it is with them as it is with a painter who, while knowing exactly what he desires to depict and, theoretically, exactly how to paint it, nevertheless fails again and again in his attempts to do so, until, as sometimes happens, chance seems to point a way to achievement. Such an experience came to Belasco, in his execution of the imaginative and lovely scene of the River of Souls, in this Oriental tragedy. Writing of it, he records the following interesting recollection: