to dissolve, the lines blur, the details fade away, and while the walls and the whole room slowly melt, with the same slow transition the flower garden blossoms out, the flower garden where he and she sat together under the lilac bush and he confessed to her his boyish love.  And then the garden slowly vanishes and through the flowers we see once more the dim outlines of the room and they become sharper and sharper until we are in the midst of the study again and nothing is left of the vision of the past.

The technique of manufacturing such gradual transitions from one picture into another and back again demands much patience and is more difficult than the sudden change, as two exactly corresponding sets of views have to be produced and finally combined.  But this cumbersome method has been fully accepted in moving picture making and the effect indeed somewhat symbolizes the appearance and disappearance of a reminiscence.

This scheme naturally opens wide perspectives.  The skilful photoplaywright can communicate to us long scenes and complicated developments of the past in the form of such retrospective pictures.  The man who shot his best friend has not offered an explanation in the court trial which we witness.  It remains a perfect secret to the town and a mystery to the spectator; and now as the jail door closes behind him the walls of the prison fuse and melt away and we witness the scene in the little cottage where his friend secretly met his wife and how he broke in and how it all came about and how he rejected every excuse which would dishonor his home.  The whole murder story becomes embedded in the reappearance of his memory ideas.  The effect is much less artistic when the photoplay, as not seldom happens, uses this pattern as a mere substitute for words.  In the picturization of a Gaboriau story the woman declines to tell before the court her life story which ended in a crime.  She finally yields, she begins under oath to describe her whole past; and at the moment when she opens her mouth the courtroom disappears and fades into the scene in which the love adventure began.  Then we pass through a long set of scenes which lead to the critical point, and at that moment we slide back into the courtroom and the woman finishes her confession.  That is an external substitution of the pictures for the words, esthetically on a much lower level than the other case where the past was living only in the memory of the witness.  Yet it is again an embodiment of past events which the genuine theater could offer to the ear but never to the eye.

Just as we can follow the reminiscences of the hero, we may share the fancies of his imagination.  Once more the case is distinctly different from the one in which we, the spectators, had our imaginative ideas realized on the screen.  Here we are passive witnesses to the wonders which are unveiled through the imagination of the persons in the play.  We see the boy who is to enter the navy and who sleeps