[Illustration: The Old Postmaster-General (_to the New
Postmaster-General_). "THAT YOU, HOBHOUSE? I'VE BEEN TRYING TO GET
THROUGH TO YOU ON THIS INFERNAL TELEPHONE FOR THE LAST HALF-HOUR. I WANT
TO CONGRATULATE YOU ON BEING APPOINTED TO A DEPARTMENT WHICH I LEFT IN A
STATE OF PERFECT EFFICIENCY.]
* * * * *
[Illustration: _Fair Yankee_ (_who, on her first visit to England, has
been told how extremely obliging the London policeman is_). "Say, would
you vurry kindly do up my shoe-string?"]
* * * * *
"CINES" OF THE TIMES.
(_A far-away Project of educational Films._)
O advent of the age of gold,
O happy day for proud papas
When Hellas shall her tale unfold
On secondary "cinemas"!
When "all the glory that was Greece
And all the grandeur that was Rome"
Shall hire on a perpetual lease
The academic "Picturedrome."
O OVID on the screen for kids!
O Helicon attained by 'bus!
O filmographic Aeneids!
O vitoscoped HERODOTUS!
Our boys shall note the sacred Nine
Ascending their immortal peak,
Also Apollo (he was fine
In the old films as _Alf the Freak_).
They shall behold TEIRESIAS
Telling the doom of Thebes, and con
With eyes but not with lips the crass
Way in which OEDIPUS went on.
They shall observe quite painlessly
The heroes toiling as they sit
Rowing upon the sun-kissed sea
With black smuts racing over it.
Some stout electroscopic "star,"
Some Gallic beauty bistre-eyed,
Shall show them in the years afar
How Helen laughed, how Priam died,
And how the good AENEAS came
Through faked adventures on the screen
To Latium, and what forks of flame
Devoured a dummy Punic queen.
What snares the Queen of Love employed,
What Juno: mixed with local ads,
These shall be thoroughly enjoyed
By all appreciative lads.
And some day, if the gods are kind
To hearts so filled with classic feats
In many a marble palace "cined"
And puffed so oft in halfpenny sheets,
Shall come revulsion, faintly stirred
By Phoebus' and the Muses' laugh,
Against the foul sins of a word
Like spectodrome or vitagraph.
Youth shall draw learning from the spring
Pierian, and be taught to know
The clustered verbal shames that cling
About the moving picture show,
Till at the last shall dawn a bright,
A long-to-be-remembered day,
When porticos of fanes of light
Shall print Kinema with a K.