window and sideboard. The red beard caught the light, and the wavy brown
hair brightened. Then a look of weariness, of distress, passed over the
face, and the man laid down the pen, and, taking some tobacco from a paper,
rolled a cigarette. Rising, and leaning forward, he lighted it over the
lamp. He was a man of about thirty-six feet, broad-shouldered, well-built,
healthy, almost handsome.

The time he spent in dreaming his play amounted to six times, if not ten
times, as much as he devoted to trying to write it; and he now lit
cigarette after cigarette, abandoning himself to every meditation,--the
unpleasantness of life in lodgings, the charm of foreign travel, the beauty
of the south, what he would do if his play succeeded. He plunged into
calculation of the time it would take him to finish it if he were to sit at
home all day, working from seven to ten hours every day. If he could but
make up his mind concerning the beginning and the middle of the third act,
and about the end, too,--the solution,--he felt sure that, with steady
work, the play could be completed in a fortnight. In such reverie and such
consideration he lay immersed, oblivious of the present moment, and did not
stir from his chair until the postman shook the frail walls with a violent
double knock. He hoped for a letter, for a newspaper--either would prove a
welcome distraction. The servant's footsteps on the stairs told him the
post had brought him something. His heart sank at the thought that it was
probably only a bill, and he glanced at all the bills lying one above
another on the table.

It was not a bill, nor yet an advertisement, but a copy of a weekly review.
He tore it open. An article about himself!

After referring to the deplorable condition of the modern stage, the writer
pointed out how dramatic writing has of late years come to be practised