Excerpt from The Theatre, Vol. 5: January, 1905 An undoubted and decisive element in the successful career of Nathaniel C. Goodwin is that he knows a play when he sees it. Those actors who do not possess this faculty of discernment fail. Very well; he has a play in The Usurper, a play that acts, a play that gives hint his scenes; but, with all his contributory skill, he has not been able to so modify and qualify it as to give it that degree of politeness which is required by his audiences. It is a melodrama, but he has sought to give quiet endings to the acts. He has done all that he could, and the play remains rubbish. A Western ranchman, who has made millions, and who has fallen in love with an English girl whom he chanced to meet in his early days, goes to England and leases the estate and castle of the girl's impoverished family. It is stipulated that the family remain to keep house. The girl is about to elope with an en gaging rascal. She has promised to show the tower of the castle to the ranchman. In order to save her from the elopement he persuades the girl to show him the tower at once. Once in it he locks the door. The villain is the author of the ruin of the girl's maid. The maid's father has escaped from jail, and is determined to kill the villain; his daughter is keeping the convict in concealment in the tower. By means of a series of melodramatic complications the truth comes out, the girl is saved, so that the ranchman does not pay for his lease in vain. Mr. Goodwin in fuses his humor into many of the scenes, but, on the whole, the play does not require further record. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.