They helped him. After a Selig domestic drama came a stirring
Vitagraph Western scene, "The Goat of the Rancho," which
depicted with much humor and tumult the revolt of a ranch cook,
a Chinaman. Mr. Wrenn was really seeing, not cow-punchers and
sage-brush, but himself, defying the office manager's surliness
and revolting against the ticket-man's rudeness. Now he was
ready for the nearly overpowering delight of travel-pictures.
He bounced slightly as a Gaumont film presented Java.
He was a connoisseur of travel-pictures, for all his life he had
been planning a great journey. Though he had done Staten Island
and patronized an excursion to Bound Brook, neither of these was
his grand tour. It was yet to be taken. In Mr. Wrenn,
apparently fastened to New York like a domestic-minded barnacle,
lay the possibilities of heroic roaming. He knew it. He, too,
like the man who had taken the Gaumont pictures, would saunter
among dusky Javan natives in "markets with tiles on the roofs
and temples and--and--uh, well--places!" The scent of Oriental
spices was in his broadened nostrils as he scampered out of the
Nickelorion, without a look at the ticket-taker, and headed for
"home"--for his third-floor-front on West Sixteenth Street.
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