Recently a widely traveled oil man was telling me of an afternoon he spent at a trading town on the East African coast, a thousand miles or so north of the Cape. “I was killing the day with an old trader,” he said. “We were to set out into the interior the next morning, and had nothing to do but amuse ourselves until we were ready to start. We saw the posters of a movie that was being shown, that told a story of the very town where we were. And say! When we went in, we certainly were amused, all right! “It was an American film, made by one of the Hollywood companies. The heroine was washed ashore from the wreck, and regained consciousness just in time to see a tiger ready to spring at her from under the palm-trees at the edge of the beach. But the hero was Johnny-on-the-spot. He was tiger-hunting himself, and dropped the beast with a single shot. He was wearing riding-breeches, and puttees, and a pith helmet,—sort of a cross between a motion-picture director and a polo player.” “What was the matter with it?” I asked, “Everything?” “Pretty much. First place, the beach along those parts isn’t anything like what was shown in the picture. There aren’t any palm-trees within a thousand miles. Tigers don’t grow in that part of the world, either. Lions, yes. But tigers, no. You have to go clear to India to get tigers. “But that hero’s outfit was the best. In the heat, there, he’d have died in six hours, in that outfit. My friend the old trader and I were wearing about all that anybody ever wears in those parts—ragged old shirts, and “shorts”—like running pants, or B. V. D.’s—and keeping out of the sun. If you do have to go around, in the heat of the day, the one important thing is to wear some kind of a hat or cloth that protects the back of your neck and saves you from sunstroke. But the movie hero was sprinting around in the middle of the day with leather legs and a cartridge belt that would weigh at least ten pounds. Say, we had a great laugh!” Not long ago I was asked to look at a film, made in Austria, that told a story of love and intrigue among the American millionaires. The hero’s father was supposed to be a railroad king who lived in New York City, and the girl’s mother, who also lived in New York, was a “railroad queen” at the head of a rival organization. Each morning the lovers, the hero and the heroine, slipped away from their homes—that looked more like the New York Public Library or the Pennsylvania Station than anything else except an Austrian palace—and ran down to the railroad yards. The boy stole a regular German engine from his father’s round-house, and the girl got its twin sister from her mother’s shop on the other side of the city, and they each climbed aboard and ran them outside the city until they met, on the same track, head on. Then the lovers got down and kissed each other on both cheeks in true American fashion (Austrian interpretation) somewhere near Hoboken, I suppose.