growing industry. The latest consignment, _The Cinderella Man_, first
arrived in this country in the form of a novel, and the difficulty it
offered was that the struggling hero, _Anthony Quintard_, whose fate
depended, in the absence of common-sense, on his winning a ten thousand
dollar prize for an opera libretto, seemed to me, from samples of his
work exhibited, to be an unlikely competitor. But I must say that when
at the play I saw our Mr. NARES in his garret sucking at his pipe in
that masterful manner and modifying what might so easily have been a too
sticky situation with a charmingly light touch, I began to think better
of _Anthony's_ chances and therefore necessarily of Mr. EDWARD CHILDS
CARPENTER'S general idea. For the author obviously may claim the credit
of this reading, even if I harbour an obstinate private suspicion that
it was only by a very deliberate and steadfast determination on the
part of Mr. NARES as hero and Mr. HOLMAN CLARK as matchmaker that this
particular reading prevailed.

Mr. CARPENTER doesn't believe in mystifications. He explains everything
with the completest candour in his first Act, from which you gather that
a millionaire's daughter, returning from Paris to the immense stuffy New
York mansion, is desperately lonely, and has also cut herself free from
an unsatisfactory affair of the heart; that a young poet, a friend
of the millionaire's sentimental lawyer, is also lonely, living like
_Cinderella_ (isn't this wrong?) in an attic next-door, proud as poor;
that another friend of the millionaire has offered a prize for a
libretto. Having thus put the rabbit, the bird-cage and the flowerpot
into the hat in front of you he proceeds in a leisurely manner to take
them out again.

The young millionairess, posing as a poor "companion," visits the
starveling poet _viâ_ the snow-covered roof and the attic window,