In late 1895 the American author and critic Brander Matthews (1852–1929) published a short story in Scribner's Magazine entitled ‘The Kinetoscope of Time’. It tells the tale of a man who enters a strangely illuminated building on a deserted street in an unnamed city. Compelled down a darkened hallway by a mysterious force, he draws aside a velvet curtain at its end and finds himself in a large circular space. Only four kinetoscopes, Edison's popular pre-cinematic viewing device, furnish the room. Cued by a legend that appears fleetingly above one of the kinetoscopes, he looks through the eye piece and views a series of dance sequences from familiar historical and literary sources: Salome, Esmeralda's dances from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pearl dancing before her cursed mother Hester in Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Scarlet Letter and Topsy dancing from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. At the end of this sequence the narrator looks up, then follows another mysterious legend to a second kineto-scope where he views a sequence of military scenes drawn from fiction and history: the fight between Hector and Achilles, the tale of Saladin and the Knight of the Leopard from Sir Walter Scott's The Talisman, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust and Custer's Last Stand. In both instances he remarks upon the proleptic nature of his viewing experience. He seems to know what he is about to see and the manner in which it will be projected before he has even looked into the viewer.