ea what Ascher meant to do, and could make no
kind of guess at how much Tim would ultimately get, but I felt pretty
safe in promising two hundred pounds.

"Do you think I could get it at once?" said Tim. "Or even five hundred
dollars? I think I could manage with five hundred dollars. The fact
is----"

"You want to get out of that circus," I said. "I don't wonder. It must
be a very tiresome job."

"Oh, no. I don't mind the circus. It's rather a nuisance of course
moving about, and we always are moving. But I have plenty of time to
myself. It isn't to get away from the circus that I want the money. The
fact is that I'm making some experiments."

"Another invention?" I said. "What a prolific creature you are! No
sooner have you perfected a cash register than you start----"

"Oh, I've been at this for some time, for years. I believe I've hit on a
dodge---- I say, do you know anything about Movies?"

The word, though common on our side of the Atlantic now, was at that
time peculiar to the American language.

"Cinematographs?" I said. "I've seen them of course. You have them in
your circus, haven't you, as part of the show?"

"Yes. That's what set me thinking about them. I've always felt that the
next step in perfecting the cinematograph would be doing away with the
screen, putting the figures on the stage, that is to say reflections
of them, so that they would actually move about backwards and forwards
instead of on a flat surface. You understand?"

When I was a boy there was a popular entertainment known as "Pepper's
Ghost." What appeared to be a real figure moved about before the eyes
of the audience, was pierced by swords and otherwise ill-treated without
suffering any inconvenience. The thing was worked by some arrangement of
mirrors. Tim evidently had a plan for combining this illusion with the
cinematograph.

"Don't you think," he said, "that it would be a great thing?"

"It would be a perfectly beastly thing," I said. "The cinematograph is
bad enough already. If you add a grosser realism to it----"

Tim looked at me. I am nearly sure that there were tears in his eyes.

"That's just what Mrs. Ascher thinks," he said.

"I daresay she does. She probably regards the cinematograph as a sin
against art. What you propose would be an actual blasphemy."

"Oh," said Tim, "that's exactly what she said. Blasphemy! Do you really
think so too? I wouldn't go on with my experiments if I thought that.
But I don't bel