MARK TWAIN

ready to pay the young colored man, Charles W. John-
son's, way through the Yale Law School.

Along in the winter of 1887 and 1888 there
blazed into his brain a brand-new idea:

Dress up some good actors as Apollyon, Greatheart,
and the other Bunyan characters; take them to a wild
gorge and photograph them—"Valley of the Shadow of
Death"; to other effective places and photograph them,
along with the scenery; to Paris in their curious costumes,
place them near the Arc dc 1'Etoile and photograph them
with the crowd—"Vanity Fair" to Constantinople, Cairo,
Venice, 20 interesting cities, and always make them con-
spicuous in the curious foreign crowds by their costume.
Take them to Zululand. It would take two or three years
to do the photographing, and cost # 10,000; but this stere-
optical panorama of Banyan's Pilgrim's Progress could
be exhibited in all countries at the same time and clear a
fortune in a year. By and by I will do this.

Two things may occur to the reader in connec-
tion with this note, first, that in his idea lay a
prophecy of the cinematograph and second the
modest estimate of the cost of getting his enter-
prise under way.

October 4,1887. If in 1891 I find myself not rich enough
to carry out my scheme of buying Christopher Columbus'
bones and burying them under the Statue of Liberty En-
lightening the World, I will give the idea to somebody
who is rich enough.

For Princeton Review—to be written in April, 1888: If
you attempt to create a wholly imaginary incident, ad-
venture or situation, you will go astray and the artificiality
of the thing will be detectable, but if you found on a
fact in your personal experience it is an acorn, a root,

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