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VIOLET MERSEREAU
The Moving Picture Baby
By FLORENCE VINCENT
It was a queer little bundle of humanity, not two months ofd, that left the foundlings' ward and was carried by an attendant to the great studio in Culver where a baby was needed, and where incidentally hundreds of Moving Pictures are made yearly, and shown all over the civilized world nightly for rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.
Buster, in the two months of his gay, sad, little life, has earned for his erring mother over a hundred dollars — a record which should make even the Goulds', Astors' and Vanderbilts' pampered offspring hide their kewpie faces and blush for very shame.
With the dawn of the great Moving Picture industry has come a place for the renowned, the obscure, even unto the least. And out of the Valley of Death the young mother lifts her face and smiles thru her tears. She suddenly sees her little Buster a man, a bread-winner, a tiny factor in the great machine, and it lessens the heartache of it all as she lies, wan and silent, on her narrow cot.
No questions were asked of Buster's past in Filmland. They wanted a baby, the embodiment of beauty and happiness. They sought for it. They found it — not in a palace, satin-cushioned, serene; but in turmoil, out of the depths of despair and gloom, the refuge of derelicts, there flourished the heart of a rose.
As to the countless multitude, they are left in delightful ignorance of sinister shadows*; they see before them on the screen an adorable, chubbyfisted cherub who smiles out at them. And if Buster gladdens, even momentarily, the hearts of the beaten, the tired, the oppressed, surely then he has not lived in vain, this little "god of happiness."
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