wayward girl is so affected by meeting with the crippled child that she remains at home with her mother instead of going out to join a party of friends of questionable character; on another floor she is instrumental in preventing an ex-convict from joining his former pals in another crime; in the flat above, she brings together two lovers who are about to part in anger; in the next flat she comforts a busy dressmaker who has lost patience with and scolded her little girl for being in her way while she is at work, and who realizes on seeing Annie that she should at least be thankful that her child has health and strength, and does not, therefore, add the care and worry of sickness to the burden of poverty.  Finally, on the top floor, a young man, heart-sick and weary of the vain search for work in a strange city, coming out of his room finds little Annie asleep, her head resting against 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.