added, as the gloomy
actor stuttered and stammered. "We know what you mean. But where
is Mr. Ringold; or Mr. Hadley?"

"They're around somewhere," explained Miss Shay, when the other
members of the company, with whom they had spent so many happy and
exciting days, had offered their greetings. "Are you in such a
hurry to see them?" she asked of Blake.

"Oh, not in such an _awful_ hurry," he answered with a laugh, as
Birdie Lee came out of a dressing room, smiling rosily at him.

"I guess not!" laughed Miss Shay.

Soon the interval between the scenes of the drama then being
"filmed," or photographed, came to an end. The actors and
actresses took their places in a "ball room," that was built on
one section of the studio floor.

"Ready!" called the manager to the camera operator, and as the
music of an unseen orchestra played, so that the dancing might be
in perfect time, the camera began clicking and the action of the
play, which included an exciting episode in the midst of the
dance, went on. It was a gay scene, for the ladies and gentlemen
were dressed in the "height of fashion."

It was necessary to have every detail faithfully reproduced, for
the eye of the moving picture camera is more searching, and
far-seeing, than any human eye, and records every defect, no
matter how small. And when it is recalled that the picture thrown
on the screen is magnified many hundred times, a small defect, as
can readily be understood, becomes a very large one.

So great care is taken to have everything as nearly perfect as
possible. Blake and Joe watched the filming of the drama,
recalling the time when they used to turn the handle of the camera
at the same work, before they were chosen to go out after bigger
pictures--scenes from real life. The operator, a young fellow;
whom both Blake and Joe knew, looked around and nodded at them,
when he had to stop grinding out the film a moment, to allow the
director to correct something that had unexpectedly gone wrong.

"Don't you wish you had this easy job?" the operator asked.

"We may, before we come back from Panama," answered Blake.

A little later Mr. Ringold and Mr. Hadley came in, greeting the
two boys, and then began a talk which lasted for some time, and in
which all the details of the projected work, as far as they could
be arranged in advance, were gone over.

"What we want," said Mr. Hadley, "is a series of pictures about
the Canal. It will soon be open for regular tr