k form, a most readable
work. It is by G.C. Hazelton, Jr., and J.H. Benrimo. The resemblance
between the stage property and the thing represented is fairly close. The
moving flags on each side of the actor suggest the actual color and
progress of the chariot, and abstractly suggest its magnificence. The red
sack used for a bloody head has at least the color and size of one. The
dressed-up block of wood used for a child is the length of an infant of
the age described and wears the general costume thereof. The farmer's
hoe, though exaggerated, is still an agricultural implement.

The evening's list of properties is economical, filling one wagon, rather
than three. Photographic realism is splendidly put to rout by powerful
representation. When the villager desires to embody some episode that if
realistically given would require a setting beyond the means of the
available endowment, and does not like the near-Egyptian method, let him
evolve his near-Chinese set of symbols.

The Yellow Jacket was written after long familiarity with the Chinese
Theatre in San Francisco. The play is a glory to that city as well as to
Hazelton and Benrimo. But every town in the United States has something
as striking as the Chinese Theatre, to the man who keeps the eye of his
soul open. It has its Ministerial Association, its boys' secret society,
its red-eyed political gang, its grubby Justice of the Peace court, its
free school for the teaching of Hebrew, its snobbish chapel, its
fire-engine house, its milliner's shop. All these could be made visible
in photoplays as flies are preserved in amber.

Edgar Lee Masters looked about him and discovered the village graveyard,
and made it as wonderful as Noah's Ark, or Adam naming the animals, by
supplying honest inscriptions to the headstones. Such stories can be told
by the Chinese theatrical system as well. As many different films could
be included under the general title: "Seven Old Families, and Why they
Went to Smash." Or a less ominous series would be "Seven Victorious
Souls." For there are triumphs every day under the drab monotony of an
apparently defeated town: conquests worthy of the waving of sun-banners.
Above all, The Yellow Jacket points a moral for this chapter because
there was conscience behind it. First: the rectitude of the Chinese
actors of San Francisco who kept the dramatic tradition alive, a
tradition that was bequeathed from the ancient generations. Then the
artistic integr