Cinderella’s Slipper is not sufficiently the heroine in moving pictures of that story.  It should be the tiny leading lady of the piece, in the same sense the mighty steam-engine is the hero of the story in chapter two.  The peasants when they used to tell the tale by the hearth fire said the shoe was made of glass.  This was in mediaeval Europe, at a time when glass was much more of a rarity.  The material was chosen to imply a sort of jewelled strangeness from the start.  When Cinderella loses it in her haste, it should flee at once like a white mouse, to hide under the sofa.  It should be pictured there with special artifice, so that the sensuous little foot of every girl-child in the audience will tingle to wear it.  It should move a bit when the prince comes frantically hunting his lady, and peep out just in time for that royal personage to spy it.  Even at the coronation it should be the centre of the ritual, more gazed at than the crown, and on as dazzling a cushion.  The final taking on of the slipper by the lady should be as stately a ceremony as the putting of the circlet of gold on her aureole hair.  So much for Cinderella.  But there are novel stories that should be evolved by preference, about new sorts of magic shoes.

We have not exhausted Moving Day.  The chairs kept still through the Cinderella discourse.  Now let them take their innings.  Instead of having all of them dance about, invest but one with an inner life.  Let its special attributes show themselves but gradually, reaching their climax at the highest point of excitement in the reel, and being an integral part of that enthusiasm.  Perhaps, though we be inventing a new fairy-tale, it will resemble the Siege Perilous in the Arthurian story, the chair where none but the perfect knight could sit.  A dim row of flaming swords might surround it.  When the soul entitled to use this throne appears, the swords might fade away and the gray cover hanging in slack folds roll back because of an inner energy and the chair might turn from gray to white, and with a subtle change of line become a throne.

The photoplay imagination which is able to impart vital individuality to furniture will not stop there.  Let the buildings emanate conscious life.  The author-producer-photographer, or one or all three, will make into a personality some place akin to the House of the Seven Gables till the ancient building dominates the fancy as it does in Hawthorne’s tale.  There are various ways to bring about this result:  by having its outlines waver in the twilight, by touches of phosphorescence, or by the passing of inexplicable shadows or the like.  It depends upon what might be called the genius of the building.  There is the Poe story of The Fall of the House of Usher, where with the death of the last heir the castle falls crumbling into the tarn.  There are other possible tales on such terms, never yet imagined, to be born to-morrow.  Great structures may become in sort villains, as in the old Bible narrative of the origin of the various languages.  The producer can show the impious Babel Tower, going higher and higher into the sky, fascinating and tempting the architects till a confusion of tongues turns those masons into quarrelling mobs that become departing caravans, leaving her blasted and forsaken, a symbol of every Babylon that rose after her.