but he
did not lose faith in the work. He had composed it in love and knew its
potentialities, His faith found justification when he produced it in
Brescia three months later and saw it start out at once on a triumphal
tour of the European theatres. His work of revision was not a large or
comprehensive one. He divided the second act into two acts, made some
condensations to relieve the long strain, wrote a few measures of
introduction for the final scene, but refused otherwise to change the
music. His fine sense of the dramatic had told him correctly when he
planned the work that there ought not to be a physical interruption of
the pathetic vigil out of which Blanche Bates in New York and Evelyn
Millard in London had made so powerful a scene, but he yielded to the
compulsion of practical considerations, trying to save respect for his
better judgment by refusing to call the final scene an act, though he
permitted the fall of the curtain; but nothing can make good the loss
entailed by the interruption. The mood of the play is admirably
preserved in the music of the intermezzo, but the mood of the listeners
is hopelessly dissipated with the fall of the curtain. When the scene
of the vigil is again disclosed, the charm and the pathos have
vanished, never to return. It is true that a rigid application of the
law of unities would seem to forbid that a vigil of an entire night
from eve till morning be compressed into a few minutes; but poetic
license also has rights, and they could have been pleaded with
convincing eloquence by music, with its marvellous capacity for
publishing the conflicting emotions of the waiting wife.

His ship having been ordered to the Asiatic station, Benjamin Franklin
Pinkerton, Lieutenant in the United States Navy, follows a custom (not
at all unusual among naval officers, if Pierre Loti is to be believed)
and for the summer sojourn in Japan leases a Japanese wife. (The word
"wife" is a euphemism for housekeeper, companion, play-fellow,
mistress, what not.) This is done in a manner involving little
ceremony, as is known to travellers and others familiar with the social
customs of Nippon, through a nakodo, a marriage broker or matrimonial
agent. M. Loti called his man Kangourou; Mr. Long gave his the name of
Goro. That, however, and the character of the simple proceeding before
a registrar is immaterial. M. Loti, who assures us that his book is
merely some pages from a veritable diary, entertains