the greatest credit to the artist of our house....” He turned the crank, and horses and shadows chased each other with kaleidoscopic effect. It formed a pretty and a fanciful picture. Slowly the horses came to a standstill. “I had staked on that one,” exclaimed a woman’s voice as the cream-coloured bay stopped beneath the goal, and in its head the eyes gleamed forth like stars. They were formed of small electric lamps. The croupier said: “I will not detain you much longer from trying your luck, dear madam. I have only now to introduce to you the epoch-making novelty of the ‘Go-ahead’ Institute. What would you do, ladies and gentlemen” (here he raised his voice), “if the police were suddenly to intrude upon you and rob you of your money and your freedom on account of your forbidden game? You need have no anxiety on that score. We have hit upon an arrangement which might be called a _garde-police_. The ‘Go-ahead’ Institute may await the police quite calmly. They may be surrounded and inundated by the police. With a pressure of my little finger I can turn the whole police force of the city away from you and let them go ahead elsewhere. Look here!” He raised his hand, then lowered it with affected impressiveness, pressing his forefinger down upon the black knob near him. A moment later the surface of the table was set in motion, and it began to sink. It moved rapidly and noiselessly, and the speaker sank down with it. The boxes remained stationary, but from the dome the little horses and the coloured circles descended--came past the boxes; the dome followed, and a few minutes later a quartette of nude twelve-year-old children were to be seen dancing, upon a new stage, to the strains of fiddles and harps, which began to resound from some invisible quarter. A body of men, dressed in the uniform of the city police, trooped into the boxes, exclaiming, “We were told they were gambling here! Where are the gamblers?” Everybody in the boxes roared with laughter. The girls continued dancing, and the uniformed police threw off their disguise and appeared in evening dress, laughing. The floor began to move again, the girls still dancing, one of them making a gesture to a gentleman sitting alone, who sprang towards her, but failed to reach his vanishing charmer. The floor once more became the ceiling, the _petits chevaux_ reappeared, and in the centre of the gaming-table sat the croupier once again. “You see, ladies and gentlemen, we do give the police something for their pains--the nude girls! And if the case were really serious, they would soon have a scrap of clothing on. I have to announce that there is a change of programme every week....” He continued for some time further in this way. “This is only an ordinary cinema,” said Wenk, turning to Karstens, and whispering, “the most ordinary kind of cinema. If the police were to come, they would discover the whole trick in ten minutes.” Karstens merely shrugged his shoulders.