It may be that the future historian will be moved to point out the superficial likeness between the variety-show and the Sunday issues of certain American newspapers. These Sunday newspapers are really magazines--that is to say, they occupy a position midway between journalism and literature, just as the variety-show occupies a position midway between the circus and the theater. The magazine pages of these Sunday newspapers set before their readers a very variegated bill of fare; they provide photographs of recent events--which are the equivalent of the moving-pictures of the variety-show; they contain short-stories--which are, in narrative, what the brief plays of the variety-show are in dialog and action; they abound in anecdotes and in comic sayings--which are closely akin to the utterances of the sidewalk conversationalists of the variety-show. And the variety-show itself is like journalism, in that it is a modern combination of elements of the remotest antiquity, for altho the actual newspaper is only two or three centuries old, there were always channels by which news was conveyed to the eager public. The men of Athens nearly two thousand years ago were glad to hear and to tell some new thing, and their wants were supplied, even if there was in classical antiquity and in the Middle Ages no organization faintly anticipating the marvelous machinery for collecting and distributing information possessed by the newspapers of the twentieth century. (1912.) XV THE METHOD OF MODERN MAGIC THE METHOD OF MODERN MAGIC I