I visited Butler Davenport for the third time last Sunday. The main house is a rambling mid-Victorian affair, with queer crannies and cupola rooms from which one can look far across the hills to the Sound. On its left is an old farmhouse of the eighteenth century, furnished as Mr. Butler’s grandfather left it, and with a musty smell which no old-furniture shop could counterfeit. Between the two is an old-fashioned garden, in midsummer filled with larkspur, cosmos, and a hundred other flowers which few but our grandmothers could name. At the intersection of walks at its center is a crab-apple tree, surrounded by a bench. A formal garden with high, thick cedar hedges, bird-houses, unsuspected grass walks and an avenue of woodbine arches lies on the other side of the main house. In the rear, stretching out towards the wide valley, is a long, hedged walk ending in an arch, between fields of wild flowers. Down it one could go to any kind of distant mystery. The theatre is a simple, strong little building behind the old farmhouse. Its most expert bit of carpentry is the balcony, but that is, of course, unpretentious. The seats are ordinary kitchen chairs, and there is nothing on the stage but a reading desk. But the luxury of sitting between wide-open doors in the hill-breeze, full of grass odors and wing sounds, is better than the comfort of plush seats and much gilded fresco. This time, however, as there were only four of us, we sat out under an apple tree. Except for a moment when a tragic passage was interrupted to shoo away a loud-voiced and ill-mannered hen, it was the most nearly perfect theatre I have known. And the play? It is impossible to do more than hint at the nature of unpublished plays. This one dealt with the “white slave” question, but in a way infinitely superior to the melodrama of _The Lure_ or _The Fight_. There was another, of subtler treatment, called _Deferred Payment_, showing the natural retribution seeking out a man who looked for everything in a woman except companionship. _Keeping Up Appearances_—the one actually produced—pictures a middle-class family engaged in a tragic struggle with the pocket book on account of the false ideals of the community. _Justice_, written before Galsworthy’s play of the same name, draws a parallel between society’s persecution of a woman who is consecrated to a fine love without marriage, and society’s punishment of the unfortunate victims of prostitution. Mr. Davenport’s best work is in _The Importance of Coming and Going_, a satirical tragi-comedy which contrasts the exaggerated emphasis we lay on death with the casual way we regard birth. When a person who never should have come into the world leaves it, perhaps gladly, we weep copiously and buy showy funerals; but mothers let their daughters marry any kind of man of wealth or position, without giving them any insight into the mysteries of birth.