by Edward O'Henry
Relayed from Madame Tussaud's Cinema

Ever since the one and only original Madame Tussaud came over from France with her Napoleonic relics and her flair for entertaining the public, her name has been a synonym for the children's Paradise and for the neurotics' nightmare of Victorian London. Is there any of us who has not as a child been taken round that awesome array of Kings and Queens and statesmen; who has not asked the way of the wax policeman, and stood in lengthy admiration of the flesh-and-blood commissionaire; who has not gasped at the historical tableaux (the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, acquired a new reality after one had seen that impressive scene); who has not ached with timorous longing to venture into the Chamber of Horrors, and been told firmly that he was not old enough yet? When Madame Tussaud's was burnt down we felt that another bit of the old London had vanished, with Regent Street and the Empire and the horse-'buses and all the rest. But it has arisen again from its ashes, triumphant, as full as ever of waxen celebrities, with a new Chamber of Horrors and a new and imposing cinema thrown in. How surprised old Madame Tussaud would be if she could know that, under her own name, organ music from a cinema (if she could be made to realise what a cinema is) was to be transmitted regularly through the ether, and heard by people all over the British Isles!