in the
foreground. There is no use turning it over. It would take Maeterlinck or
Swedenborg to find the mystic meaning of a duck. A duck looks to me like
a caricature of an alderman.

Here is a sieve: [Illustration] Roman equivalent, H. A sieve placed on
the kitchen-table, close-up, suggests domesticity, hired girl humors,
broad farce. We will expect the bride to make her first cake, or the
flour to begin to fly into the face of the intrusive ice-man. But, as to
the other side of the cardboard, the sieve has its place in higher
symbolism. It has been recorded by many a sage and singer that the
Almighty Powers sift men like wheat.

Here is the picture of a bowl: [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the
letter K. A bowl seen through the photoplay window on the cottage table
suggests Johnny's early supper of bread and milk. But as to the white
side of the cardboard, out of a bowl of kindred form Omar may take his
moonlit wine, or the higher gods may lift up the very wine of time to the
lips of men, as Swinburne sings in Atalanta in Calydon.

Here is a lioness: [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the letter L. The
lion or lioness creeps through the photoplay jungle to give the primary
picture-word of terror in this new universal alphabet. The present writer
has seen several valuable lions unmistakably shot and killed in the
motion pictures, and charged up to profit and loss, just as
steam-engines or houses are sometimes blown up or burned down. But of
late there is a disposition to use the trained lion (or lioness) for all
sorts of effects. No doubt the king and queen of beasts will become as
versatile and humbly useful as the letter L itself: that is, in the
commonplace routine photoplay. We turn the cardboard over and the lion
becomes a resource of glory and terror, a symbol of cruel persecutions or
deathless courage, sign of the zodiac that Poe in Ulalume calls the Lair
of the Lion.

Here is an owl: [Illustration] Roman equivalent, the letter M. The only
use of the owl I can record is to be inscribed on the white surface. In
The Avenging Conscience, as described in chapter ten, the murderer marks
the ticking of the heart of his victim while watching the swinging of the
pendulum of the old clock, then in watching the tapping of the
detective's pencil on the table, then in the tapping of his foot on the
floor. Finally a handsome owl is shown in the branches outside
hoot-hooting in time with the action of the pencil, and the p