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96 THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT
On his way to Europe, he visited his relatives in the Penny Arcade. The performance tickled his keen sense of humour. He agreed to help out by searching for novelties abroad. In Paris, he found an Automatic Gypsy Fortune-Teller which performed a realistic pantomime as it delivered the card. He bought the American rights for the Penny Arcade. On the voyage home, he amused himself by writing hopeful but cryptic prophecies for the fortune-cards; and all the automatic gypsy machines, even to this day, use those little jokes of Shauer’s. When Kohn offered him a slice of the Automatic Vaudeville Company and a salary as manager, he threw up his good prospects in the dry-goods business to accept.
They both rose. Kohn’s commercial sense and his talent for mechanics made him before long the eminent figure among exhibitors of penny arcades. Then the moving picture began slowly to out-distance all other devices for cheap amusement. Kohn saw that coming; and when about 1909 the stream of pennies dwindled, he slid painlessly over into motion-picture exhibition. Never again in the centre of Adolph Zukor’s enterprises, he operated nevertheless on their outskirts. He has retired from business now — “with as much money as is good for me,” he says. His country estate behind the western palisades of the Hudson lies near Adolph Zukor’s; for after the temporary irritation raised by the mad situation in that original Penny Arcade, they settled down as affectionate kinsmen whose careers ran