These are a few films from the human biograph of Harry Barnes, old actor. You know, when you are old, you accept life with more or less of a sigh of quiet acquiescence, and by your cozy fire you sit and nod to an inner voice, a gentle old voice which over and over whispers and murmurs--"Once upon a time, once upon a time." And possibly Barnes would have nodded, too, but he lacked the cozy fire. Life has its dramatic unities, it would seem, and if one thing or another is awry we are apt not to perform as the book says we should. No cozy fire, says the Great Stage Manager; no nodding acquiescence, replies the Mummer in the Play. Barnes listened, it is true, over and over to the voice which murmured "Once upon a time," but he sat not by a comfortable open grate, amid grandchildren. Instead, he lurked in East Fourteenth Street amid decaying agents' offices, hunting a chance to do a bad monologue in a worse vaudeville show. He had outlasted his time; he could not get work. He lived on those two heartless things, Hope and Memory. And for all I know he is living on them yet. Now, you will not in your careless youth or your sceptical maturity find beauty in this story, you will not "get under the skin" of it, as the saying is, unless you have stopped sometime in your busy going, to consider, aside and with understanding, the pathos of the old actor. It is a curiously poignant human thing, written about by a few, suffered by many, and ignored by the loud, inordinate world. The old actor out of employment! A target for jokes, a piece of battered, ancient "property" cluttering up a new and very busy stage. You smile at his curious figure, unconscious of the broken misery that aches beneath, where life has died and living goes paradoxically on; and only sometimes late at night do you get a part of that hidden ache when you hear old legs drag weary feet up the boarding-house stairs, past your door and on up into the skylight room on the roof, despondently to bed; and you know that the old man has had another unsuccessful day among the agents and the managers. You can sometimes interpret the querulous little laugh over the thin oatmeal at breakfast, sometimes you can guess the water in the rapidly winking eyes; but of course you do not proclaim your deductions. Civilization is a process of making less noise about things. This is a segment of the life-film of Harry Barnes, old actor, as he traveled the stones of Fourteenth Street. Not the Rialto, where fat men adorned with fat diamonds smoke fat cigars in order to narcotize fat consciences; but Fourteenth Street, grimy with old, sparsely-tenanted buildings, where theatrical offices three flights up bargain for the driblets of trade among the low music-halls and the cheapest vaudeville houses, where niggardly, gray-haired agents have for two generations sat among their dusty contracts and their rusty pens, haggling over bread-and-water salaries with the jetsam of a too-volatile profession.