So, too, with the Air-and-Grass Hero.  For all of his tempered muscles and his lariat and his Winchester rifle, he was presently exposed as a fraud.  He was just as Long-winded and just as Immaculate as the Victorian Hero that he displaced.

What the public really wants and has always wanted in its books is wickedness.  Fiction was recognised in its infancy as being a work of the devil.

So the popular novel, despairing of real wickedness among the cannibals, and in the ruined tower at midnight, and on the open-air of the prairies, shifted its scenes again.  It came indoors.  It came back to the city.  And it gave us the new crop of heroes and heroines and the scenes and settings with which the fiction of to-day has replaced the Heroes and Heroines of Yesterday.  The Lure of the City is its theme.  It pursues its course to the music of the ukalele, in the strident racket of the midnight cabaret.  Here move the Harvard graduate in his dinner jacket, drunk at one in the morning.  Here is the hard face of Big Business scowling at its desk; and here the glittering Heroine of the hour in her dress of shimmering sequins, making such tepid creatures as Madeline and Kate look like the small change out of a twenty-five cent shinplaster.

3.—­The Discovery of America;
    Being Done into Moving Pictures and Out Again

“No greater power for education,” said President Shurman the other day, “has come among us during the last forty years than the moving picture.”

I am not certain that it was President Shurman.  And he may not have said it the other day.  Nor do I feel absolutely sure that he referred to the last forty years.  Indeed now that I come to think of it, I don’t believe it was Shurman.  In fact it may have been ex-President Eliot.  Or was it, perhaps, President Hadley of Yale?  Or did I say it myself?  Judging by the accuracy and force of the language, I think I must have.  I doubt if Shurman or Hadley could have put it quite so neatly.  There’s a touch about it that I recognise.

But let that pass.  At any rate it is something that everybody is saying and thinking.  All our educators have turned their brains towards the possibility of utilising moving pictures for the purpose of education.  It is being freely said that history and geography, and even arithmetic, instead of being taught by the slow and painful process of books and memory, can be imparted through the eye.

I had no sooner heard of this idea than I became impassioned to put it into practice.  I have therefore prepared, or am preparing, a film, especially designed for the elementary classes of our schools to narrate the story of the discovery of America.

This I should like the reader to sit and see with me, in the eye of his imagination.  But let me first give the plain, unvarnished account of the discovery of America as I took it from one of our school histories.