Here is a duck:  [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the letter Z. In the motion pictures this bird, a somewhat z-shaped animal, suggests the finality of Arcadian peace.  It is the last and fittest ornament of the mill-pond.  Nothing very terrible can happen with a duck in the foreground.  There is no use turning it over.  It would take Maeterlinck or Swedenborg to find the mystic meaning of a duck.  A duck looks to me like a caricature of an alderman.

Here is a sieve:  [Illustration] Roman equivalent, H. A sieve placed on the kitchen-table, close-up, suggests domesticity, hired girl humors, broad farce.  We will expect the bride to make her first cake, or the flour to begin to fly into the face of the intrusive ice-man.  But, as to the other side of the cardboard, the sieve has its place in higher symbolism.  It has been recorded by many a sage and singer that the Almighty Powers sift men like wheat.

Here is the picture of a bowl:  [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the letter K. A bowl seen through the photoplay window on the cottage table suggests Johnny’s early supper of bread and milk.  But as to the white side of the cardboard, out of a bowl of kindred form Omar may take his moonlit wine, or the higher gods may lift up the very wine of time to the lips of men, as Swinburne sings in Atalanta in Calydon.

Here is a lioness:  [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the letter L. The lion or lioness creeps through the photoplay jungle to give the primary picture-word of terror in this new universal alphabet.  The present writer has seen several valuable lions unmistakably shot and killed in the motion pictures, and charged up to profit and loss, just as steam-engines or houses are sometimes blown up or burned down.  But of late there is a disposition to use the trained lion (or lioness) for all sorts of effects.  No doubt the king and queen of beasts will become as versatile and humbly useful as the letter L itself:  that is, in the commonplace routine photoplay.  We turn the cardboard over and the lion becomes a resource of glory and terror, a symbol of cruel persecutions or deathless courage, sign of the zodiac that Poe in Ulalume calls the Lair of the Lion.

Here is an owl:  [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the letter M. The only use of the owl I can record is to be inscribed on the white surface.  In The Avenging Conscience, as described in chapter ten, the murderer marks the ticking of the heart of his victim while watching the swinging of the pendulum of the old clock, then in watching the tapping of the detective’s pencil on the table, then in the tapping of his foot on the floor.  Finally a handsome owl is shown in the branches outside hoot-hooting in time with the action of the pencil, and the pendulum, and the dead man’s heart.

But here is a wonderful thing, an actual picture that has lived on, retaining its ancient imitative sound and form:  [Illustration] the letter N, the drawing of a wave, with the sound of a wave still within it.  One could well imagine the Nile in the winds of the dawn making such a sound:  “NN, N, N,” lapping at the reeds upon its banks.  Certainly the glittering water scenes are a dominant part of moving picture Esperanto.  On the white reverse of the symbol, the spiritual meaning of water will range from the metaphor of the purity of the dew to the sea as a sign of infinity.