husband. She changes from lips of waiting,
with a touch of apprehension, to a delighted laugh of welcome, her head
making a half-turn toward the door. The audience is so moved by the
beauty of the slow change they do not know whether her face is the size
of the screen or the size of a postage-stamp. As a matter of fact it
fills the whole end of the theatre.

Thus much as to faces that are not hieroglyphics. Yet fixed facial
hieroglyphics have many legitimate uses. For instance in The Avenging
Conscience, as the play works toward the climax and the guilty man is
breaking down, the eye of the detective is thrown on the screen with all
else hid in shadow, a watching, relentless eye. And this suggests a
special talisman of the old Egyptians, a sign called the Eyes of Horus,
meaning the all-beholding sun.

Here is the picture of an inundated garden: [Illustration] Latin
equivalent, the letter S. In our photoplays the garden is an ever-present
resource, and at an instant's necessity suggests the glory of nature, or
sweet privacy, and kindred things. The Egyptian lotus garden had to be
inundated to be a success. Ours needs but the hired man with the hose,
who sometimes supplies broad comedy. But we turn over the cardboard, for
the deeper meaning of this hieroglyphic. Our gardens can, as of old, run
the solemn range from those of Babylon to those of the Resurrection.

If there is one sceptic left as to the hieroglyphic significance of the
photoplay, let him now be discomfited by page fifty-nine, Standard
Dictionary. The last letter in this list is a lasso: [Illustration]. The
equivalent of the lasso in the Roman alphabet is the letter T. The crude
and facetious would be apt to suggest that the equivalent of the lasso in
the photoplay is the word trouble, possibly for the hero, but probably
for the villain. We turn to the other side of the symbol. The noose may
stand for solemn judgment and the hangman, it may also symbolize the
snare of the fowler, temptation. Then there is the spider web, close kin,
representing the cruelty of evolution, in The Avenging Conscience.

This list is based on the rows of hieroglyphics most readily at hand. Any
volume on Egypt, such as one of those by Maspero, has a multitude of
suggestions for the man inclined to the idea.

If this system of pasteboard scenarios is taken literally, I would like
to suggest as a beginning rule that in a play based on twenty
hieroglyphics, nineteen should be the b