In the sumptuous puppet-show in the gardens of the Tuileries the same result is achieved by the employment of two or three manipulators, so that four or even six figures may appear at once. This has greatly enlarged the scope of the performance; and the manager of this theater has very ambitious aims. He likes to rearrange for his juvenile audience the most appropriate of the pieces which have won favor in the real theaters, and to present these with all sorts of spectacular adornments. He has even ventured to give plays as elaborate as 'Around the World in Eighty Days.' But it may be doubted whether this vaulting ambition has not overleaped itself, and whether a puppet-show does not gain rather than lose by restricting its efforts within narrower limits. After all, nothing so delights us at a puppet-show as the feats which are most characteristic and least difficult of accomplishment. We joy to behold one tiny figure belaboring another with his solid club or to follow the vicissitudes of a bout at single-stick, when both combatants thwack lustily at each other's wooden heads. III Yet this mention of M. Lemercier de Neuville's _Pupazzi_, with their varied repertory of Aristophanic commentaries on current events, and this memory of the spectacular efforts exhibited in the gardens of the Tuileries, suggest a possible explanation for the fact that Punch and Judy have failed to find wide-spread favor here in America and that they seem to be losing their pristine popularity in England. There is a pitiable monotony of program in all English-speaking puppet-shows. They confine their repertory to the single play which sets forth the deeds and misdeeds of Mr. Punch. Now, in the Continent of Europe there is no such monotony. Not only in the gardens of the Tuileries but in the Champs-Elysées a young spectator can sit thru performance after performance without fear of having to witness the same piece. Punch appears in only one drama, whereas his French rival, Guignol, in his time plays many parts, with a host of other characters to be his associates, some in one piece and some in another. And the several plays are adorned with a variety of scenery. Of course, there cannot be a very wide range of subject; and always is the stick a prominent feature in the miniature drama. There are a certain number of traditional Guignol pieces, handed down from generation to generation. Some of these have been printed for the use of devoted students of the drama, and some are to be had in little pamphlets for the benefit of the happy French children who may have had a puppet theater with its dozen or more figures presented to them as a New Year's gift. There is in the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University the manuscript of half a dozen of these little plays, written out (in all the license of his own simplified spelling) by the incomparable performer who was in charge of the leading Guignol in the Champs-Elysées in 1867.