, that life was
noble and harmonious, as we stubbornly clung to poesy in contradiction
to the testimony of our senses, so we see thousands of young people
thronging the theaters bent in their turn upon the same quest. The
drama provides a transition between the romantic conceptions which
they vainly struggle to keep intact and life's cruelties and
trivialities which they refuse to admit. A child whose imagination has
been cultivated is able to do this for himself through reading and
reverie, but for the overworked city youth of meager education,
perhaps nothing but the theater is able to perform this important
office.

The theater also has a strange power to forecast life for the youth.
Each boy comes from our ancestral past not "in entire forgetfulness,"
and quite as he unconsciously uses ancient war-cries in his street
play, so he longs to reproduce and to see set before him the valors
and vengeances of a society embodying a much more primitive state of
morality than that in which he finds himself. Mr. Patten has pointed
out that the elemental action which the stage presents, the old
emotions of love and jealousy, of revenge and daring take the thoughts
of the spectator back into deep and well worn channels in which his
mind runs with a sense of rest afforded by nothing else. The cheap
drama brings cause and effect, will power and action, once more into
relation and gives a man the thrilling conviction that he may yet be
master of his fate. The youth of course, quite unconscious of this
psychology, views the deeds of the hero simply as a forecast of his
own future and it is this fascinating view of his own career which
draws the boy to "shows" of all sorts. They can scarcely be too
improbable for him, portraying, as they do, his belief in his own
prowess. A series of slides which has lately been very popular in the
five-cent theaters of Chicago, portrayed five masked men breaking into
a humble dwelling, killing the father of the family and carrying away
the family treasure. The golden-haired son of the house, aged seven,
vows eternal vengeance on the spot, and follows one villain after
another to his doom. The execution of each is shown in lurid detail,
and the last slide of the series depicts the hero, aged ten, kneeling
upon his father's grave counting on the fingers of one hand the number
of men that he has killed, and thanking God that he has been permitted
to be an instrument of vengeance.

In another series o