Motion picture play! Why the very idea of it! Goodness, how interesting! Do you know anything that is nicer than motion pictures! At once Jimsi was wide awake and eager. “Oh, I want to know about the motion picture play!” she exclaimed. “Oh, please do tell me! Was it really true moving pictures?”
“Yes,” asserted Joyce, “they were real, weren’t they, Mother? But the pictures weren’t photographs at all. You wait and I’ll show you my motion picture screen and my whole outfit! Mother, will you get them for me, please?—You see, Jimsi, it was in the fall when the crow told me about these pictures. In summer I can go outdoors and once Daddy wheeled me into town and they let me see the motion pictures. (I can’t go often because it is such a long ride for me.) Well, I could think of nothing else afterwards but how much I wanted to go again! You know how it is.”
Jimsi wagged her head hard, “yes.” She didn’t want to interrupt the story.
“One day when Miss Phoebe was over here, I told her about how I wanted to go to motion pictures again and Miss Phoebe said she’d see what the crow could do about it— You know how Miss Phoebe makes believe always!”
Again Jimsi nodded. “I love to make believe the way auntie does,” she beamed. “Please tell me what happened next.”
“Well, next, of course, came a crow letter. I found it in a bunch of flowers Miss Phoebe sent over.” (Joyce was trying to cover up the things that her mother had laid in her lap. Jimsi’s eyes had been busy with the details. There looked as if paper dolls were there.)
“You mustn’t peep,” admonished Joyce. “It won’t be a surprise if you see. It was a surprise for me! I didn’t know that one could really make motion picture fun right at home—not till Miss Phoebe’s crow wrote me a play letter about it.”
“Well, I can’t see how you do it!”
“You can do it with the papers in the Magic Book,” declared Joyce.
“Oh, have you a magic book too!”