ere entirely unsuited for general
consumption.

When this particular topic untactfully was broached in his presence Mr.
Lobel, recalling the fate of the elaborate feature entitled Let Freedom
Ring, had been known to sputter violently and vehemently. Upon this
production--now abiding as a memory only, yet a memory bitter as
aloes--he had spared neither expense nor pains, even going so far as
personally to direct the filming of all the principal scenes. And to
what ends? Captious critics, including those who wrote for the daily
press and those who merely sent in offensive letters--college professors
and such like cheap high-brows--had raised yawping voices to point out
that Paul Revere galloping along the pre-Revolutionary turnpike to
spread the alarm passed en route two garages and one electric power
house; that Washington crossing the Delaware stood in the bow of his
skiff half shrouded in an American flag bearing forty-eight stars upon
its field of blue; that Andrew Jackson's riflemen filing out from New
Orleans to take station behind their cotton-bale breastworks marched for
some distance beneath a network of trolley wires; that Abraham Lincoln
signing the Emancipation Proclamation did so while seated at a desk in a
room which contained in addition to Lincoln and the desk and the
Proclamation a typewriter and a Persian rug; that at Manila Bay Admiral
Dewey wore spats and a wrist watch.

But these primitive adventurings, these earlier pioneering quests into
the realm of the speculative were all in limbo behind them, all wiped
off the slate, in part forgiven, in a measure forgotten. Since that
primitive beginning and those formulative middle periods Lobel
Masterfilms had found their field, and having found it, now plowed and
tilled it. To those familiar with the rise and the ever-forward movement
of this, now the fourth largest industry in the civilized globe--or is
it the third?--it sufficiently will fix the stage of evolutionary
development attained by this component unit of that industry when I
state that Lobel Masterfilms now dealt preponderantly with vampires. To
be sure, it continued to handle such side lines as taffy-haired ingenues
from the country, set adrift among the wiles and pitfalls of a cruel
city; such incidentals as soft-pie comickers and chin-whiskered
by-Hectors; such necessary by-products as rarely beautiful he-juveniles
with plush eyelashes and the hair combed slickly back off the forehead
in the