one thousand years I can read
hieroglyphics without a pony. But meanwhile, I tour museums and I ride
Pharaoh's "horse," and suggest to all photoplay enthusiasts they do the
same. I recommend these two books most heartily: Elementary Egyptian
Grammar, by Margaret A. Murray, London, Bernard Quaritch, 11 Grafton
Street, Bond Street, W., and the three volumes of the Book of the Dead,
which are, indeed, the Papyrus of Ani, referred to in this chapter, pages
255-258. It is edited, translated, and reproduced in fac-simile by the
keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum,
Professor E.A. Wallis Budge; published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York,
and Philip Lee Warner, London. This book is certainly the greatest motion
picture I ever attended. I have gone through it several times, and it is
the only book one can read twelve hours at a stretch, on the Pullman,
when he is making thirty-six hour and forty-eight hour jumps from town to
town.

American civilization grows more hieroglyphic every day. The cartoons of
Darling, the advertisements in the back of the magazines and on the
bill-boards and in the street-cars, the acres of photographs in the
Sunday newspapers, make us into a hieroglyphic civilization far nearer to
Egypt than to England. Let us then accept for our classic land, for our
standard of form, the country naturally our own. Hieroglyphics are so
much nearer to the American mood than the rest of the Egyptian legacy,
that Americans seldom get as far as the Hieroglyphics to discover how
congenial they are. Seeing the mummies, good Americans flee. But there is
not a man in America writing advertisements or making cartoons or films
but would find delightful the standard books of Hieroglyphics sent out by
the British Museum, once he gave them a chance. They represent that very
aspect of visual life which Europe understands so little in America, and
which has been expanding so enormously even the last year. Hallowe'en,
for instance, lasts a whole week now, with mummers on the streets every
night, October 25-31.

Chapter XX--The Prophet-Wizard. Who do we mean by The Prophet-Wizard? We
mean not only artists, such as are named in this chapter, but dreamers
and workers like Johnny Appleseed, or Abraham Lincoln. The best account
of Johnny Appleseed is in Harper's Monthly for November, 1871. People do
not know Abraham Lincoln till they have visited the grave of Anne
Rutledge, at Petersburg, Illinois, then