My curiosity was amply satisfied, and my misgivings were realized, when I received a letter from Margaret three weeks after she sailed. It was post-marked Gibraltar, and it ran astoundingly:
I’m too ill to write, but I must. Try, if you can, to invent some plausible excuse for me, and tell Charlie about it. I can’t possibly write to him. I tried--I really tried--to arrange the papers so that he’d get only a favorable impression from them; but I couldn’t--and I couldn’t let him find mother out. If he had, he’d have been hurt, and he’d have filled his book with reservations. He’s terribly conscientious. I couldn’t bear to have poor mother’s name injured, even if she did treat me badly. She did a lot of good in her way, and she was rather magnificent. So one night I dropped the papers overboard, journal and all. It’s a great deal better so.
I sha’n’t stop till I get to Assisi. Don’t let Charlie be angry with me. I trust you to understand.
Ever sincerely yours, ~Margaret Longbow~.
I give the letter in full because it explains why no complete biography of Mrs. Longbow has ever been published. Conscientious Charles, naturally, has been unwilling to write a two-volume life without the essential documents, and Margaret has never put her recollections into a book. Helen Bradford’s pompous work, “The Public and Private Life of My Mother,” hardly serves as a biography; it really gives more information about Mrs. Bradford than about Mrs. Longbow. To supply the public’s need of an intimate picture of the great philanthropist I have here set down my impressions of her.
ITS COMMERCIAL, EDUCATIONAL, AND ARTISTIC VALUE
It has been variously estimated that there are already from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand moving-picture show-places in the United States. Greater New York alone has six hundred. Their development as an industry has been very recent. For while as early as 1864 a French patent was granted to Ducos for a battery of lenses, which, actuated in rapid succession, depicted successive stages of movement, this device could not have fulfilled the requirements of the moving-picture of to-day for the important reason, if for no other, that the dry, sensitized plate of that day could not receive impressions with sufficient rapidity. With the advent of instantaneous photography came what was probably the direct forerunner of the motion-picture in the work of Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer who, about 1878, began his camera studies of “The Horse in Motion,”[4] “Animal Locomotion,”[5] and other motion studies. His work was begun in California, on the private race-course of Governor Leland Stanford. Here he employed a battery of twenty-four cameras, spaced a foot apart, the shutters of which were sprung by the horse coming in contact with threads stretched across the track.