rewritten, reversed, turned inside out and
topsy-turvy--one long, hopeless confusion from beginning to end--was the
opera, as, everybody helping, we had "knocked it into shape."

"That's your opera," I said, pushing across to him the bulkier bundle.
"If you can understand it, if you can make head or tail of it, if you
care to produce it, it is yours, and you are welcome to it. This is
mine!" I laid it on the table beside the other. "It may be good, it may
be bad. If it is played at all it is played as it is written. Regard the
contract as cancelled, and make up your mind."

He argued with force, and he argued with eloquence. He appealed to my
self-interest, he appealed to my better nature. It occupied him forty
minutes by the clock. Then he called me an obstinate young fool, flung
the opera as "knocked into shape" into the waste-paper basket--which
was the only proper place for it, and, striding into the middle of the
company, gave curt directions that the damned opera was to be played as
it was written, and be damned to it!

The company shrugged its shoulders, and for the next month kept them
shrugged. For awhile Hodgson remained away from the rehearsals, then
returning, developed by degrees a melancholy interest in the somewhat
gloomy proceedings.

So far I had won, but my difficulty was to maintain the position. The
low comedian, reciting his lines with meaningless monotony, would pause
occasionally to ask of me politely, whether this or that passage was
intended to be serious or funny.

"You think," the leading lady would enquire, more in sorrow than in
anger, "that any girl would behave in this way--any real girl, I mean?"

"Perhaps the audience will understand it," would console himself
hopefully the tenor. "Myself, I confess I don't."

With a sinking heart concealed beneath an aggressively disagreeable
manner, I remained firm in my "pigheaded conceit," as it was regarded,
Hodgson generously supporting me against his own judgment.

"It's bound to be a failure," he told me. "I am spending some twelve to
fifteen hundred pounds to teach you a lesson. When you have learnt it
we'll square accounts by your writing me an opera that will pay."

"And if it does succeed?" I suggested.

"My dear boy," replied Hodgson, "I never make mistakes."

From all which a dramatic author of more experience would have gathered
cheerfulness and hope, knowing that the time to be depressed is when the
manager and company unanim