on shipboard the first night; the walls disappear and his imagination flutters from port to port.  All he has seen in the pictures of foreign lands and has heard from his comrades becomes the background of his jubilant adventures.  Now he stands in the rigging while the proud vessel sails into the harbor of Rio de Janeiro and now into Manila Bay; now he enjoys himself in Japanese ports and now by the shores of India; now he glides through the Suez Canal and now he returns to the skyscrapers of New York.  Not more than one minute was needed for his world travel in beautiful fantastic pictures; and yet we lived through all the boy’s hopes and ecstasies with him.  If we had seen the young sailor in his hammock on the theater stage, he might have hinted to us whatever passed through his mind by a kind of monologue or by some enthusiastic speech to a friend.  But then we should have seen before our inner eye only that which the names of foreign places awake in ourselves.  We should not really have seen the wonders of the world through the eyes of his soul and with the glow of his hope.  The drama would have given dead names to our ear; the photoplay gives ravishing scenery to our eye and shows the fancy of the young fellow in the scene really living.

From here we see the perspective to the fantastic dreams which the camera can fixate.  Whenever the theater introduces an imagined setting and the stage clouds sink over the sleeper and the angels fill the stage, the beauty of the verses must excuse the shortcomings of the visual appeal.  The photoplay artist can gain his triumphs here.  Even the vulgar effects become softened by this setting.  The ragged tramp who climbs a tree and falls asleep in the shady branches and then lives through a reversed world in which he and his kind feast and glory and live in palaces and sail in yachts, and, when the boiler of the yacht explodes, falls from the tree to the ground, becomes a tolerable spectacle because all is merged in the unreal pictures.  Or, to think of the other extreme, gigantic visions of mankind crushed by the Juggernaut of war and then blessed by the angel of peace may arise before our eyes with all their spiritual meaning.

Even the whole play may find its frame in a setting which offers a five-reel performance as one great imaginative dream.  In the pretty play, “When Broadway was a Trail,” the hero and heroine stand on the Metropolitan Tower and bend over its railing.  They see the turmoil of New York of the present day and ships passing the Statue of Liberty.  He begins to tell her of the past when in the seventeenth century Broadway was a trail; and suddenly the time which his imagination awakens is with us.  Through two hours we follow the happenings of three hundred years ago.  From New Amsterdam it leads to the New England shores, all the early colonial life shows us its intimate charm, and when the hero has found his way back over the Broadway trail, we awake and see the last gestures with which the young narrator shows to the girl the Broadway buildings of today.