stated hours each day.

The leisure enforced by truly creative screen art was often occupied
now with really moving pictures of Metta Judson placing practicable food
upon the Gashwiler table. This had been no table in a gilded Broadway
resort, holding empty coffee cups and half empty wine glasses, passed
and repassed by apparently busy waiters with laden trays who never
left anything of a practicable nature. Doubtless the set would not have
appealed to Henshaw. He would never have been moved to take close-ups,
even for mere flashes, of those who ate this food. And yet, more and
more as the days went by, this old-time film would unreel itself before
the eager eyes of Merton Gill. Often now it thrilled him as might have
an installment of The Hazards of Hortense, for the food of his favourite
pharmacy was beginning to pall and Metta Judson, though giving her
shallow mind to base village gossip, was a good cook. She became the
adored heroine of an apparently endless serial to be entitled The
Hazards of Clifford Armytage, in which the hero had tragically little to
do but sit upon a bench and wait while tempting repasts were served.

Sometimes on the little bench around the eucalyptus tree he would run
an entire five-thousand-foot program feature, beginning with the Sunday
midday dinner of roast chicken, and abounding in tense dramatic moments
such as corned-beef and cabbage on Tuesday night, and corned-beef hash
on Wednesday morning. He would pause to take superb closeups of these,
the corned beef on its spreading platter hemmed about with boiled
potatoes and turnips and cabbage, and the corned beef hash with its
richly browned surface. The thrilling climax would be the roast of beef
on Saturday night, with close-ups taken in the very eye of the camera,
of the mashed potatoes and the apple pie drenched with cream. And there
were close-ups of Metta Judson, who had never seriously contemplated
a screen career, placing upon the table a tower of steaming hot cakes,
while a platter of small sausages loomed eloquently in the foreground.

With eyes closed he would run this film again and again, cutting here,
rearranging sequences, adding trims from suddenly remembered meals of
the dead past, devising more intimate close-ups, such as the one
of Metta withdrawing pies from the oven or smoothing hot chocolate
caressingly over the top of a giant cake, or broiling chops, or saying
in a large-lettered subtitle--artistically decorated wi