CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Vitagraphoscope

VAUDEVILLE is intrinsically episodic a

continuous. Its audiences do not dema noûements. Sufficient unto each "turn" is thereof. No one cares how many roman singing comédienne may have had if she can sustain the limelight and a high note or two audiences reck not if the performing do to the pound the moment they have through their last hoop. They do not bulletins about the possible injuries recei the comic bicyclist who retires head-first fr stage in a crash of (property) china-ware. do they consider that their seat coupons them to be instructed whether or no the

a tableau of the united lovers, backgrounɑea by aefeated villainy and derogated by the comic, osculating maid and butler, thrown in as a sop to the Cerberi of the fifty-cent seats.

"or

But our programme ends with a brief “turn" two; and then to the exits. Whoever sits the show out may find, if he will, the slender thread that binds together, though ever so slightly, the story that, perhaps, only the Walrus will understand.

Extracts from a letter from the first vice-president of the Republic Insurance Company, of New York City, to Frank Goodwin, of Coralio, Republic of Anchuria.

My Dear Mr. Goodwin: -Your communication per Messrs. Howland and Fourchet, of New Orleans, has reached us. Also their draft on N. Y. for $100,000, the amount abstracted from the funds of this company by the late J. Churchill Wahrfield, its former president. The officers and directors

unite in requesting me to express to you their sincere esteem and thanks for your prompt and much appre

winning manners, noble and womanly nature vied position in the best metropolitan society Cordially yours,

LUCIUS E. APPLEGA

First Vice-President the Republic Insu

Company.

The Vitagraphoscope

(Moving Pictures)

The Last Sausage

SCENE-An Artist's Studio. The artist, man of prepossessing appearance, sits in a attitude, amid a litter of sketches, with 1 resting upon his hand. An oil stove stands o box in the centre of the studio. The art tightens his waist belt to another hole, and l stove. He goes to a tin bread box, half-hi

showing that there is no more oil. The artist, in evident despair, seizes the sausage, in a sudden access of rage, and hurls it violently from him. At the same time a door opens, and a man who enters receives the sausage forcibly against his nose. He seems to cry out; and is observed to make a dance step or two, vigorously. The newcomer is a ruddy-faced, active, keen-looking man, apparently of Irish ancestry. Next he is observed to laugh immoderately; he kicks over the stove; he claps the artist (who is vainly striving to grasp his hand) vehemently upon the back. Then he goes through a pantomime which to the sufficiently intelligent spectator reveals that he has acquired large sums of money by trading pot-metal hatchets and razors to the Indians of the Cordillera Mountains for gold dust. He draws a roll of money as large as a small loaf of bread from his pocket, and waves it above his head, while at the same time he makes pantomime of drinking from a glass. The

The Writing on the Sands

SCENE- The Beach at Nice. A woman tiful, still young, exquisitely clothed, com poised, reclines near the water, idly scrawling in the sand with the staff of her silken parasobeauty of her face is audacious; her languid one that you feel to be impermanent — you

v

pectant, for her to spring or glide or crawl panther that has unaccountably become sto She idly scrawls in the sand; and the word t always writes is "Isabel." A man sits a fe away. You can see that they are companion if no longer comrades. His face is dark and

and almost inscrutable but not quite. T

speak little together. The man also scrat the sand with his cane. And the word that h

is

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Anchuria." And then he looks out wh Mediterranean and the sky intermingle, wit in his gaze.