The magic cell of music—the electric piano in the shallow tiled lobby of Altamont’s favorite cinema, the Ajax, stopped playing with firm, tinny abruptness, hummed ominously for a moment, and without warning commenced anew. It’s a long way to Tipperary. The world shook with the stamp of marching men.
Miss Margaret Blanchard and Mrs. C. M. McReady, the druggist’s drugged wife who, by the white pitted fabric of her skin, and the wide bright somnolence of her eyes, on honey-dew had fed too often, came out of the theatre and turned down toward Wood’s pharmacy.
To-day: Maurice Costello and Edith M. Storey in Throw Out the Lifeline, a Vitagraph Release.
Goggling, his great idiot’s head lolling on his scrawny neck, wearing the wide-rimmed straw hat that covered him winter and summer, Willie Goff, the pencil merchant, jerked past, with inward lunges of his crippled right foot. The fingers of his withered arm pointed stiffly toward himself, beckoning to him, and touching him as he walked with stiff jerking taps, in a terrible parody of vanity. A gaudy handkerchief with blue, yellow and crimson patterns hung in a riotous blot from his breast-pocket over his neatly belted gray Norfolk jacket, a wide loose collar of silk barred with red and orange stripes flowered across his narrow shoulders. In his lapel a huge red carnation. His thin face, beneath the jutting globular head, grinned constantly, glutting his features with wide, lapping, receding, returning, idiot smiles. For should he live a thousand years, he never will be out of humor. He burred ecstatically at the passers-by, who grinned fondly at him, and continued down to Wood’s where he was greeted with loud cheers and laughter by a group of young men who loitered at the fountain’s end. They gathered around him boisterously, pounding his back and drawing him up to the fountain. Pleased, he looked at them warmly, gratefully. He was touched and happy.
“What’re you having, Willie?” said Mr. Tobias Pottle.
“Give me a dope,” said Willie Goff to the grinning jerker, “a dope and lime.”
Pudge Carr, the politician’s son, laughed hilariously. “Want
