e reelers
featuring the plastic pie and the treacherous seltzer siphon, also the
trick staircase, the educated mustache and the performing doormat.

Next--following along the line of least resistance--the adventurers went
in more or less extensively for wild-western dramas replete with
stagecoach robberies and abounding in hair pants. If the head bad
man--not the secondary bad man who stayed bad all through, or the
tertiary bad man who was fatally extinguished with gun-fire in Reel Two,
but the chief, or primary, bad man who reformed and married Little Nell,
the unspoiled child of Death Valley--wore the smartest frontier get-up
of current year's vintage that the Chicago mail-order houses could turn
out; if Little Nell's father, appearing contemporaneously, dressed
according to the mode laid down for Forty-niners by such indubitable
authorities as Bret Harte; if the sheriff stalked in and out of lens
range attired as a Mississippi River gambler was popularly supposed to
have been attired in the period 1860 to 1875; and if finally the cavalry
troopers from the near-by army post sported the wide hats and khaki
shirts which came into governmental vogue about the time of the Spanish
War, all very well and good. The action was everything; the sartorial
accessories were as they might be and were and frequently still are.

Along here there intruded a season when the Lobel shop tentatively
experimented with costume dramas--the Prisoner of Chillon wearing the
conventional black and white in alternating stripes of a Georgia chain
gang and doing the old Sing Sing lock step and retiring for the night to
his donjon cell with a set of shiny and rather modern-looking leg irons
on his ankles; Mary Queen of Scots and Catharine de' Medici in costumes
strikingly similar; Oliver Goldsmith in Sir Walter Raleigh's neck ruff
and Captain Kidd's jack boots.

But this season endured not for long. Costume stuff was nix. It was not
what the public wanted. It was over their heads. Mr. Lobel himself said
so. Wake him up in the middle of the night and he could tell you exactly
what the public did and did not want. Divining the popular will amounted
with him to a gift; it approximated an exact art; really it formed the
corner stone of his success. Likewise he knew--but this knowledge
perhaps had come to him partly by experience rather than altogether by
intuition--that historical ten reelers dealing with epochal events in
the life of our own people w