man could eat, and he could withhold the means due to his dead sister's son. Could he look on Chillon and not feel that the mother's heart was beating in her son's fortunes? Half the money due to Chillon would have saved him from ruin. Lord Levellier laid his fork on the plate. He munched his grievance with his bit of meat. The nephew and niece here present feeding on him were not so considerate as the Welsh gentleman, a total stranger, who had walked up to Lekkatts with the Countess of Fleetwood, and expressed the preference to feed at an inn. Relatives are cormorants. His fork on his plate released the couple. Barely half a dozen words, before the sitting to that niggard restoration, had informed Carinthia of the step taken by her brother. She beckoned him to follow her. I "The worst is done now, Chillon. am silent. Uncle is a rock. You say we must not offend. I have given him my whole mind. Say where Riette is to live." "Her head-quarters will be here, at a furnished house. She's with her cousin, the Dowager." "Yes. She should be with me." "She wants music. She wants-poor girl-let her have what comes to her." Their thoughts beneath their speech were like fish darting under shadow of the traffic bridge. "She loves music," said Carinthia; "it is almost life to her; like fresh air to me. Next month I am in London; Lady Arpington is kind. She will give me as much of their polish as I can take. I dare say I should feel the need of it if I were an enlightened person." "For instance, did I hear Owain,' when your Welsh friend was leaving?" Chillon asked. "It was his dying wife's wish, brother." Keep to the rules, dear." 66 "They have been broken, Chillon." Mend them." quote him falsely, to shield the sex. Quite right. But my sister must not be tricky. Keep to the rules. You're an exceptional woman; and it would be a good argument if you were not in an exceptional position." 66 Owain is the exceptional man, brother." "My dear, after all, you have a husband." "I have a brother, I have a friend, I have no-I am a man's wife and the mother of his child; I am free, or husband would mean dungeon. Does my brother want oath from me? That I can give him." Conduct, yes; I couldn't doubt you," said Chillon. 'But the world's a flood at a dyke for women, and they must keep watch, you've read." "But Owain is not our enemy," said Carinthia, in her deeper tones, expressive of conviction and thereby not assuring to hear. "He is a man with men, a child with women. His Rebecca could describe him; I laugh now at some of her sayings of him; I see her mouth, so tenderly comical over her big 'simpleton,' she called him, and loved him so." The gentleman appeared on the waste land above the house. His very loose black suit and a peculiar roll of his gait likened him to a mourning boatswain who was jolly. In Lord Levellier's workshop his remarks were to the point. Chillon's powders for guns and blasting interested him, and he proposed to ride over from Barlings to witness a test of them. "You are staying at Barlings?" Chillon said. "Yes; now Carinthia is at Esslemont," he replied, astoundingly, the simpleton. His conversation was practical and shrewd on the walk with Chillon and Carinthia down to Esslemont; evidently he was a man well armed to encoun ter the world; social usages might be taught him. Chillon gained a round view of the worthy simple fellow, unlikely to turn out impracticable, for he talked such good sense upon matters of business. Carinthia saw her brother tickled and interested. A feather moved her. Full of tears though she was, her heart lay open to the heavens and their kind, small, wholesome gifts. Her happiness in the walk with her brother and friend, the pair of them united by her companionship, both of them showing they counted her their comrade, was the nearest to the radiant day before she landed on an island and imagined happiness grew here, and found it to be gilt thorns, loud mockery. A shaving northeaster tore the scream from hedges and the roar from copses under a faceless breadth of sky, and she said, as they turned into Esslemont Park lane: "We have had one of our old walks today, Chillon!" "You used to walk together long walks over in your own country," said Mr. Wythan. "Yes, Owain, we did, and my brother never knew me tired.” "Never knew you to confess to it," said Chillon, as he swallowed the name on her lips. (To be continued.) THE WILD GEESE By James Herbert Morse THE wild geese, flying in the night, behold Which buoys them on its billows. Liberty To them no foe but the remorseless cold, And froth of polar currents darting past, That have been nigh the world's-end lair of storms Yes, those frail beings, tossing on the Vast 'Tis we who dread the thunder, and not they. "MISS JERRY," THE FIRST PICTURE PLAY I MIGHT have described it by another phrase. Indeed, I have been appalled by the number of descriptive terms which critics and commentators have suggested as applying with equal if not greater fitness to the partnership of monologue and photographs from life to which I gave the name "picture play." But perhaps it is too late now, if I had the wish, to call it anything else. And, to tell the truth, in the stress of the problem of the thing it self, I have been content to let others worry about the name. Primarily my purpose was to illustrate art with life. Five or six years ago, when my plan first was made, I discovered several instances in which photographs from life were used to illustrate fiction, and many other instances in which fiction evidently had been adjusted to photographs from life. Neither of these phases offered any practical hint toward the picture play. The suggestion definitely came through a group of photographic studies from living characters, which were tossed together in a "picture talk" that I called "Ourselves as Others See Us." After outlining a combination of fiction and photography, each devised with a regard for the demands and limitations of the other, it began to be quite clear that the pictures must do more than illustrate. Thus there would be two points of radical difference from the illustrator's scheme. In the first place, the pictures would be primary, the text secondary. Again the pictures would not be art at all in the illustrator's sense, but simply the art of the tableau vivant plus the science of photography. If it is the function of art to translate nature, it is the privilege of photography to trans GLIMPSES OF The heroine of "Miss Jerry" is a girl of Eastern birth, reared among the mines and cow-camps of Colorado. Richard Holbrook goes into the West with his young wife after the financial crash of '73. Soon after reaching Col mit nature. But in this case the tableaux vivants must be progressive, that the effect of reality may arise not from the suspended action of isolated pictures, but from the blending of many. Here the stereopticon came to my aid. By carefully "registering" the backgrounds of the successive pictures in a scene, the figures alone are made to appear to move, thus slowly producing the effect which Mr. Edison has wrought, in a different way, with his kinetoscope. Here again the range of the picture-play plan gave it peculiar advantages, for not only could I pass from one fictitious scene to another, but I could introduce the backgrounds of real life, as I have done in several instances, bringing the living characters of my fictitious action against the actual life of the city-an interesting, if sometimes discouraging, labor. The importance of the pictures in this relationship is analogous to the importance of the action in a play. The text or monologue, freed, for the most part, from the necessity of describing the appearance or actions of the characters, has to concern itself simply with their thoughts and words; and thus, in effect, a novelette which might require three hours to read, by this division of communication between the eye and the ear can be presented in an hour and a half or less time. In "Miss Jerry" my purpose has been to test experimentally, in a quiet story, certain possibilities of illusion, with this aim always before me, that the illusion should not, because it need not and could not safely, be that of photographs from an acted play, nor of artistic illustration, but the illusion of reality. "MISS JERRY" A. B. orado his wife dies, and his child, Geraldine, grows up under the father's care, the only girl in the county, the pet of a rough community, in which she receives the title of the "Princess of Panther Mine." When the story opens Holbrook and his daughter have been in New York again for five years enjoying the fruits of the miner's success, and the first cloud of misfortune appears in the shape of a letter from the mine reporting probable disaster. Moreover, Holbrook's New York investments have not turned out favorably. It begins to seem as if the miner and his daughter must make some radical changes in their way of living, yet Holbrook clings to the hope of averting disaster. The thought of confronting Geraldine with misfortune fills him with peculiar distress. When she surprises him in his painful reverie, he starts guiltily, slipping the letter into his pocket and muttering some commonplace about being late for the office. But she reads the new trouble in his face, and the Colorado postmark on the envelope, which he has not taken from the table, confirms her suspicions of trouble at the mine. On the same morning Kate, the maid, announces, in much excitement, that there is " a pirate in the hall." The "pirate" turns out to be a picturesque person who lounges in with a strange mixture of assurance and diffidence in his manner, and who drawls, "I guess this is Jerry!" Yes, it is!" exclaims the girl; "and is this you, Pink?" she adds, extending her hand, which the picturesque person, to the distress of the maid, grasps fervently. With increased astonishment Kate hears the pirate say, "Waal, I'll be hanged if I'd knowed yer, Miss Jerry, yer got to be such a woman!" VOL. XVIII.-37 66 "But, Pink," pursues Jerry, surveying Pink's sombre. ro, buckskin coat and leather breeches, "what on earth are you doing in this rig?" Rig? Advertisin' the show, I guess. Anyhow, I ain't got any other hat that's fit to wear just about now. I'll have t' tell yer about it. But shoot me, I can't git used t' this bein' you!" "You look so funny, Pink, worse than Charlie Allen used to look." "Yes, I suppose I do. But I'm right in this now. II suppose y' heered about my gittin' married to Mary?" "Yes, soon after I went away." "And y' know what kind of a shot Mary was?" "A much better shot than cook." "Waal, somehow she got it inter her head t' go inter a show; and finally we got over t' Denver and then t Omaha. And me and her got up a shootin' act, a reg'lar museum act, y' know; and Mary's a corker and no mistake, and I kin make a pretty good stagger myself. Of course it's dead easy at three or four yards, but we chuck a great bluff and it goes. Anyhow we was at Chicago durin' the show, and now we're down on the Bowery, at the Mammoth. I had yer address all the time from Parker and always intended to look yer up if ever I got to New York." |