Motion Picture Story Magazine (Aug 1911-Jan 1912)

The Dark Romance of a Tobacco Can (Essanay) By JOHN OLDEN "TY/iiEN ne was a* school, Jimmy \^ Moggridge smoked a cane chair, and he has since said that from cane to ordinary mixtures was not so noticeable as the change from ordinary mixtures to the Arcadia. I ask no one to believe this, for the confirmed smoker in Arcadia detests arguing with anybody about anything. ' ' So Barrie said in those unenlightened days when blends were deftly mixed by hand ; a touch of Turkish here, a pinch of Latakia there ; a liberal sprinkling of that glossy treasure from the Parish of St. James; the whole embodied with a generous portion of Clay or of Burley. I could dwell at length on those good days, did not my story confine me to a simple can and to what havoc its contents wrought. It must have oeen a half-score of years ago, when, in a diminutive, whitewashed tobacco factory on the outskirts of Louisville, Ky., our heroine sat at her accustomed bench, and from a golden pile of tobacco adroitly filled the hungry cans. She was about the same color as the weed, and the myriad kinks that crowned her quite outrivaled the curling leaf. Down the length of the long bench a row of dusky maidens were as industrious as she: a contented lot; care-free, merry; the umbra and penumbra to the rushlight of her color. Strange as it may seem, our heroine did not join in the merriment of those about her: with some dignity she maintained a proper reserve. To say the truth, she was as timid as she was sentimental. As she leaned in a muse over her task, what whispering of courage urged her to do it I cannot fathom, for she took a pencil stub from the mysteries of her kinky hair and 135 scrawled a few words upon a bit of the oiled packing-paper. Then, to prop her flagging courage, she passed it on to her seat-mates. One held the missive and drawled it aloud, while, at its simple confession, the others laughed boisterously. When it came back to its author — as most all good things do — without more ado she popped it into a full can of tobacco, gummed the stamp, and set it ready with its fellows. How it sped westward, arrow-like, with its message, and how with its barb it lay lurking until the hands of fate should open it, he who follows it may read. Some six years after the episode of the tobacco can, Mr. George Jackson, bachelor, was sunning himself with an afternoon stroll in one of the unfrequented suburbs of Chicago. It was a place where rows of small houses, each with its porch and little railings, stretched out interminably, like so much merchandise on the shelves. George was not a student of the beautiful, however, and eschewed the broad avenues where bristled the mansions of the mighty. He was, in fact, a very industrious clerk to a hardware dealer; and on a pleasant day off like this was not above his stroll, a pleasant reading under some spreading tree, and immoderate pipes of tobacco. It was this latter solace, forbidden at the shop and frowned upon by his meddlesome landlady at home, that caused the finger of fate to hover so lucklessly over the head of Mr. George Jackson. For, on that cloudless day, had he but known it, the feckful thing was surely seeking him out. George, then — whatever his judgment in other matters — had a fine taste for tobacco; and, finding his supply running low, searched in vain the by-shops of his jaunt for a replenishment. One and all they might have