The little row of dots between bosom and eyes.  From Someone and Somebody by Porter Emerson Browne, 1917.

A little row of dots to fortify the endangered hero.  From Someone and Somebody by Porter Emerson Browne, 1917.

A little row of bracketed dots that frees the narrative to return to the heroine.  From Someone and Somebody by Porter Emerson Browne, 1917.

A little row of dots that sees the night through.  From Someone and Somebody by Porter Emerson Browne, 1917.

A little row of dots that transitions a heroine into a boarding house.  From Someone and Somebody by Porter Emerson Browne, 1917.

Here's a great test of your asterisk identification ability.  What are these asterisks?  Yes, they're footlights below the stage's curtain.  From Humorous Skits For Young People by Robert Louis Fontaine.

The three dots of hopelessness, sorrow, and despair.  From Someone and Somebody by Porter Emerson Browne, 1917.

On the vital importance of a row of asterisks for communicating most anything.  From Punch, Jan. 3, 1906

Here's a novel that begins with four asterisks, like glimmering apparitions from the past.  From The Omen by John Galt, 1825.

From Mocca, 1934.

Long-term ex-readers of ours will recall that we love interpreting rows of section-break dots and asterisks as illustrations for the text above or below them.  (In fact, we published an entire book of such interpretations, Annotated Ellipses: Revealing A Hidden Dot-To-Dot Game Within A Novelist's Eccentric Punctuation).  But here's an example of the very opposite.  The narrator experiences a roadside accident and sees fifty million stars, then notes that the row of asterisks does not represent said stars but rather a period of unconsicousness.  From Pearson's, 1904.

We're often asked, "what were you on?" when we decoded the secret meanings to the profuse ellipses in an obscure novel from the 1920s.  (We compiled our surprising findings into Annotated Ellipses: Revealing A Hidden Dot-To-Dot Game Within A Novelist's Eccentric Punctuation.)  Well, the answer isn't so much what we took in but rather what we put on: special eyewear from the year 1623, as described in Uso de los Antoios para Todo Genero de Vistas.  Here's an illustration from the book, showing how the glasses focus upon rows of dots.  Here also is another illustration from the book, rather accurately showing the wearer's view of the world.