masks their actors wore; indeed, that very immobility may have been an incentive to their imaginations. When the Greeks went to their open-air theater, as when we gather around the tent-like theater of Mr. Punch, they knew in advance, as we also know, that the faces of the performers would be unchanging; therefore they did not expect any variety of expression; and probably they got along as well without it as we do at a puppet-show. There is another likeness between Attic tragedy and Punch and Judy; there is a limitation in the number of characters we are allowed to see at the same time. As the hidden performer who operates all the figures has only two hands, he can bring before us at any one moment only Mr. Punch and one other of the several characters. The fingers of the right hand animate Mr. Punch, and the fingers of the left hand animate in turn Mrs. Judy and the negro and the clown. At Athens (for reasons which need not here be discussed) the dramatist had the use of only three actors, even tho these might each of them "double" and appear as two or more of the successive characters of the play. So it was that there were never more than three persons taking part in any given episode of an Attic tragedy as there are never more than two persons taking part in any given episode of Punch and Judy. In the thumb-and-finger plays devised in Paris by M. Lemercier de Neuville, he felt so severely the inconvenience of his limitation to two characters that he devised a kind of spiral-spring arrangement inside the costumes of his little figures to hold up their heads; and he prepared invisible supports jutting out just below the flat ledge which forms the base of the proscenium. Thus he was enabled to leave the figure in sight, while he withdrew his hand to animate another character. His _Pupazzi_, as he called them, were clever caricatures of contemporary celebrities; and he was ingenious enough sometimes to maneuver half a dozen of them at once with his single pair of hands, four adjusted into the projecting rests, and two on his fingers.