We sat spellbound as Garrick unfolded the dreadful, awe-inspiring possibilities of the machine behind the screen.  He walked slowly to the back of the room.

“Now, here I have one of the latest of the inventions of the Wizard of West Orange—­Edison,” he resumed.  “It is, as you perhaps have already guessed, the latest product of this genius of sound and sight, the kinetophone, the machine that combines moving pictures with the talking machine.”

A stranger stepped in from an outer office.  He was the skilled operator of the kinetophone, whom Garrick had hired.  In a few terse sentences he explained that back of a curtain which he pulled down before us was a phonograph with a megaphone, that from his booth behind us he operated the picture films, and that the two were absolutely synchronized.

A moment later a picture began to move on the screen.  Sounds and voices seemed to emerge as if from the very screen itself.  There, before us, we saw a gambling joint operating in full blast.  It was not the Forty-eighth Street resort.  But it was strongly reminiscent of it.  From the talking machine proceeded all the noises familiar to such a scene.

Garrick had moved behind the screen that cut off our view of the galvanometer.  One after another, he was studying the emotions of each of his audience.

Suddenly the scene changed.  A door was burst in, cards and gambling paraphernalia were scattered about and hidden, men rushed to escape, and the sounds were much like those on the night of the raid.  Garrick was still engrossed in the study of what the galvanometer was showing.

The film stopped.  Without warning, the operator started another.  It was a group of men and women playing cards.  A man entered, and engaged in conversation with one of the women who was playing.  They left the room.

The next scene was in an entirely different room.  But the connection which was implied with the last scene was obvious.  Different actors entered the room, a man and a woman.  There was a dispute—­there was a crack of a revolver—­and the woman fell.  People rushed in.  Everything was done to hide the crime.  The girl was carried out into a waiting automobile, propped in as if overcome by alcohol and whisked away.  I found myself almost looking to see if the car was of the make of Warrington’s, so great was the impression the scene made on me.  Of course it was not, but it all seemed so real that one might be pardoned for expecting the impossible, especially when her body was thrown, with many a muttered imprecation, by the roadside, and in the last picture the man was cleaning the exploded gun.  One single still picture followed.  It was a huge, enlarged cartridge.

I followed the thing with eager eyes and ears.  From a long list of canned and reeled plays, Garrick had selected here and there such scenes and acts as, interspersed with a few single, original pictures of his own, like the cartridge, would serve best to recapitulate the very case which we had been investigating.  It carried me along step by step, wonderfully.