l ten days older. It has
developed quite a bouquet. Just a drop--"

The guest graciously yet firmly waved a negation.

"Thanks," he said, "but I want to enjoy the last--it--it has so much
flavour."

"It has; it has, indeed. I'll not urge you, of course. Later you must
see the simple mechanism by which I work these wonders. Alone, then, I
drink to you."

Mr. Montague alone drank of two other fruits of his loom before the
ladies appeared with dinner. He was clean--shaven now and his fine face
glowed with hospitality as he carved roast chickens. The talk was of
the shop: of what Mr. Montague scornfully called "grind shows" when
his daughter led it, and of the legitimate hall-show when he gained the
leadership. He believed that moving pictures had sounded the knell of
true dramatic art and said so in many ways.

He tried to imagine the sensations of Lawrence Barrett or Louis James
could they behold Sylvester Montague, whom both these gentlemen had
proclaimed to be no mean artist, enacting the role of a bar-room
rowdy five days on end by reclining upon a sawdust floor with his back
supported by a spirits barrel. The supposititious comments of the
two placed upon the motion-picture industry the black guilt of having
degraded a sterling artist to the level of a peep-show mountebank. They
were frankly disgusted at the spectacle, and their present spokesman
thought it as well that they had not actually lived to witness it--even
the happier phases of this so-called art in which a mere chit of a girl
might earn a living wage by falling downstairs for a so-called star,
or the he-doll whippersnapper--Merton Gill flinched in spite of
himself--could name his own salary for merely possessing a dimpled chin.

Further, an artist in the so-called art received his payment as if he
had delivered groceries at one's back door. "You, I believe--"--The
speaker addressed his guest--"are at present upon a pay-roll; but there
are others, your elders-possibly your betters, though I do not say
that--"

"You better not," remarked his daughter, only to be ignored.

"--others who must work a day and at the close of it receive a slip of
paper emblazoned 'Talent Pay Check.' How more effectively could they
cheapen the good word 'talent'? And at the foot of this slip you are
made to sign, before receiving the pittance you have earned, a consent
to the public exhibition for the purpose of trade or advertising, of
the pictures for which you may hav