At seven o'clock one morning during the season of 1881-2 a tall, gawky, angular-looking young man in a suit of smutty and wrinkled gray, under a battered slouch hat with a bandit curl to its wide brim, stood at the door of one of the rooms of the Southern Hotel in St. Louis. He had a big bundle under his arm, and seemed tired, as indeed he was, for he had climbed four pairs of stairs and walked the lower hall-ways from one end to the other looking for the room which he had now found. He knocked kindly at first, but got no answer; knocked again with the same result, and again and again. The fifth time somebody said "Come in," and the young man twisted the knob and in a moment was standing at the bedside of the late Oscar G. Bernard, business manager of the Couldock-Ellsler Hazel Kirke Company. Bernard was still in bed and very sleepy. "I've got a play I want to read to you," said the young man, shifting the bundle he had under his arm down into his hands, where Mr. Bernard could see it. "A what?" the manager exclaimed, rising hurriedly upon his elbow and looking out through drowsy eyelids at a pile of foolscap manuscript big enough to fill a French Cyclopedia. "A play," was the visitor's answer, in a quiet, unalarmed tone. "Is that it?" Bernard asked, as he eyed the package of manuscript with astonishment. "Yes, sir; there are only 439 pages." "Oh, is that all? How many characters, scenes, and acts, and how long do you think it would take to play it?" asked the manager, trying to be as sarcastic as possible. "There are forty-seven characters in the _dramatis personæ_," the playwright answered, nothing daunted, "nine acts, and it might take three hours or more to play it through." "How many people get killed in it?" "Only thirteen." "Oh, pshaw!" said the manager; "go and kill off thirty more of 'em and then you will have a play worth talking about. You've got to kill somebody off every five minutes to make it stick. You needn't leave any more of them alive than just enough to group into a happy tableau at the end of the last act." "I don't think I can do it," said the playwright. "Oh, yes, you can," the manager insisted. "Just try it once; and here, take this pass and go and see 'Hazel Kirke' to-night. It plays only until eleven o'clock, and we don't think it quite long enough. If you could tone your play down so that we might use it for a kind of prologue or something of that sort it would be better." The young man took the pass and departed. He was the queerest dramatist the country and century have produced, except possibly A. C. Gunter. He was fully six feet high, large and sharp-featured, with a light like lunacy dazzling in his black eyes and across his sallow face. His hands were large and his feet big, and as he ambled along the hotel hall he looked like an over-grown plowboy who had suddenly and mysteriously turned book-peddler. Besides all this he seemed very hungry.