The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-07
May Heaton in the Outlook.

WYE talk good deal about the cen- A/ sorship of pictures shows, and pass city ordinances to keep the young from being corrupted by them; and this is all very well, because the amuse- ment of the people ought to be kept clean and sweet; but at the same time this dis cussion has left sort Of feeling In the minds of people who do not need to go 10 the picture show that it is a doubtful sort of a place, where young girls and men scrape undesirable acquaintances, and
 where the prowler lies in wait for the
 unwary, and where suggestive hlms or
 crime and passion are invariably dis
 played But I think that this is an un-
 just Idea and that anyone who will take
 the trouble to amuse himself with the
 picture show audiences for an afternoon
 or two will see why it is that the making of films has become great industry. You cannot go to any one of the pie ture shows in New York without having
 series of touching little adventures with
 the people who sit near you, without overhearing chance words of a naivete and appreciation that make you bless the living picture book that has brought so
 much into the lives of the people who work
 Houston street on the East Side, of an afternoon is always more crowded than
 Broadway Pushcarts line the street. The
 faces that you see are almost all Jewish
 Jews of many diffirent types; swarthy little men, most of them, looking under sized according to the Anglo-Saxon stand- ard. Here and there deep-chested mother of Israel sails along, majestic in
 shietel and shawl. Their distractions are the streets, and the bargaining off the pushcarts and the show. For a continual
 trickle of people detaches itself from the crowded streets and goes into the good
 sized hall; and around the entrance, too,
 wait eager-eyed little boys, with their | tickets in their hands, trying to decoy those who enter into taking them in with them as guardians, becaunse the city or dinances do not allow a child under 16 to go in unaccompanied by an older per son. Behind us sat a woman with her es- cort. So rapt and entranced was she
 with what was happening on the stage
 that her voice accompanied all that hap pened-a little unconscious and Hitting ob-
 ligato. It was the voice of a person un- conscious that she spoke-speaking from the depths of emotion; low voice, but perfectly clear, and the unconsciously
 spoken words dropped with the sweetness of running water. She spoke in German. One would judge her to be from some part of Austria She herself was lovely in person and young, level-browed and clear-eyed. deep-chested; beneficient and lovely woman one guessed her to be. And she had never seen Indians before;
 perhaps never heard of them.
 The drama being enacted was the res cue from the bear pit of Yellow Wing,
 the lovely Indian maiden, by Dick the Trapper: his capture by the tribe, his escape with the connivance of Yellow house, their siege by the Indians, and final rescue by a splendid charge of the United States cavalry; these one saw rid ing with splendid abandon over hill and dale and the marriage then and there of Yellow Wing and Dick by the gallant chaplain A guileless and sentimental
 dime novel, most ingeniously performed
 a work of art; beautiful, too, because one had glnlpses of stately forests, sunlight shifting through leaves, wild, dancing forms of Indians, the beautiful swift
 rushing nf horses. One must have had
 heart Of stone not to follow the ad- ventures of Yellow Wing and Dick the
 Trapper with passionate interest.
 | But to the woman behind 1t was reality at its highest. She was there in fabled
 country full of painted savages.. The rap- idly unfolding drama was to her no make
 believe arrangement ingeniously fitted to-
 eether by actors and picture makers II
 had happened; 1t was happening for her lnow.
 "Ohv' she murmured. That wild and terrible people! Oh, boy, take care, take care, Those wild and awful people will
 get youv' "Das wildes und grausames voll." she called them. "Now-now-she
 comes to save her beloved'' This as Yel- low Wing hears the chief plotting an at-
 tack on Dick the Trapper. and then flies | fleet foot through the forest Surely
 surely, she will save her beloved!'' l,
 was almostih prayer; in the woman's sim pie mind there was no foregone conclusion of happy ending. She saw no step ahead