inst the frame
of the door. As he carries her down to her own flat, he picks up
courage, banishes the thoughts of suicide which a few moments before
had filled his brain, and resolves to try again. The picture ends with
the mother and father, their quarrel forgotten, bending over the
child.

[Illustration: Preparing to Take Three Scenes at Once in a Daylight
Studio]

Thus, consciously or unconsciously, Mr. Oppenheim has used the same
theme that Browning used; but he has given it a new twist with the
introduction of each new incident in the story. The little lame child
of the tenements does not seem to speak a word in the picture, and the
scene between the two young lovers parting after their quarrel is
totally unlike the scene between Ottima and Sebald in Browning's poem,
yet we feel that the good influence that changes the heart of the
burglar, as he sits there planning the new crime, is the same as that
which shakes the guilty wife and her lover when Pippa passes beneath
the window of Luca's house, singing:

_God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world!_

We have read of a Western script in which the outlaw, wounded and
bleeding, is given shelter by the heroine. When the sheriff arrives,
he sees the basin containing the bloody water and inquires how it
comes there. Even while he is looking at it, the girl cuts her hand
with a knife, and declares that, having cut herself before the
Sheriff's arrival, she has just washed her hand in the basin.

This incident, or situation, is almost identical with one in the
Ambrosio Company's "After Fifty Years," which won the first prize of
twenty-five thousand francs ($5,000) at the Turin Exhibition, and
which showed as one of its many thrilling situations the Italian
heroine gashing her hand with a knife held behind her back, to explain
to the Austrian soldier who is in search of her lover the presence of
blood on her sleeve.

Yet this could not be called a theft, or even a re-arrangement of
another writer's plot. The plot, characters, and setting were entirely
different in each play--it was only that one situation that was made
use of; and it seems likely that it was from the Ambrosio picture, or
the account of it, that the author of the Western story got his
inspiration. Yet who can really tell? Thoughts are marvellous things,
and both writers may have gotten their ideas from some other
original--or even conceived them in their own brains.

After all, as ha