Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/461
First Belle. "Yah! I wouldn't walk out with a kid like that."
Second Belle. "Well, he's got a uniform, anyhow."
THE WORLD'S LOSS.
And is old Bunny dead? Alas that that vast mobile countenance should never again be the battlefield of the emotions—fear, triumph, surprise, mortification, glee, despair. But so has it been decreed, and John Bunny, the hero of countless cinema comedies, is no more, cut down in his prime. For years he had been the favourite big funny-man of "the pictures," and though he has left countless imitators there is no successor, while his greatest rival in publicity and popularity, Max Linder, the reckless and debonair, fights for France.
Of all the unexpected developments which have followed the invention of animated photography none can be more astonishing than its bearing upon the late leviathan "featurer." What Bunny was doing when Muybridge, or Edison, or whoever it was, hit upon the discovery, I do not know, but one thing is certain, and that is that he was obscure; and (so little do we know our luck) a probability is that he was not without the wish, now and then, that Heaven had been less lavish to him in the matter of facial opulence. However, the cinema was born, and every day from that moment, although neither the cinema nor Bunny was aware of it, they were drawing nearer and nearer together, and his abounding face was more and more in danger of becoming his fortune. See how Fate works! And at last, one day, the two converging lines met. The god out of the machine, in the person of an alert cinema impresario, caught sight of Bunny; a thousand possibilities rushed through his mind; the bargain was struck, and Bunny started out on the great and wholly uncontemplated task of growing wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, if ever he had any, and becoming the best known man in the world.
For that is what he was! Helen's face may have launched a thousand ships, but Bunny's enraptured millions of audiences. Wherever a picture-palace exists, whether at Helsingfors or Brindisi, Cairo or Cape Coast Castle, Vladivostok or Littlehampton, Hobart or Duluth, Bahia Blanca or Archangel, there the features of John Bunny are as familiar as household words. Vast multitudes of human beings who do not yet know what the Kaiser looks like are intimate with Bunny's every expression.
Peace to his ashes!
LISSUE.
[My wife asks me what Lissue handkerchiefs are. I am sorry to say my answer did not satisfy her.]
Along the flaming edge where sunsets die,
Holy and virginal and white as milk
Royal princesses spin the costly silk,
The gleaming tissue
Of far-famed Lissue.
Mile after mile the Lissue gardens run;
Tall pale princesses, with their flaxen hair
Circled with crowns of gold, are spinning there
Hanky and fichu
Of filmy Lissue.
And royal ladies stifle a last yawn,
Perhaps they hear when fall the winter rains
An eerie sound across the mist-bound plains,
A ghostly "tish-oo!"
Smothered in Lissue.