from emotion, yet the story is well known to them--perhaps some one sitting near by will volunteer to explain it, asserting that he has known it ever since he was a boy and that he has read it all in a book which he has at home, called 'Reali di Franci.' It is a version of the old tale of Charlemagne and his knights, which, after traveling far from its native home in France, was taken up by the Italian people many centuries ago, and made so much their own that few heroes have been closer to their hearts than Roland, or as they call him, Orlando. Even in their homes in the New World they still celebrate him, so that the very newsboys in the streets of modern America are keeping alive the heroic traditions of the age of Charlemagne." [Illustration: A Sicilian marionette show From "By Italian Seas," by Ernest C. Peixotto] II When we compare the account which Professor Lawrence has here given of the Italian puppet-shows in New York with the description of these same performances in their native land half a century ago, which we find in the 'Roba di Roma' of W. W. Story, the American sculptor-poet, we perceive that there has been little modification of method in the past threescore years. Story studied all sides of the Roman populace, and he maintained that nothing was more characteristically Italian than the marionette theater. He tells us that the love for the acting of _burattini_ [or puppets] is universal among the lower classes thruout Italy, and in some cities, especially in Genoa, no pains are spared "in their costume, construction, and movement to render them lifelike. They are made of wood, generally from two to three feet in height, with very large heads, and supernatural glaring eyes that never wink, and are clad in all the splendor of tinsel, velvet, and steel. Their joints are so flexible that the least weight or strain upon them effects a dislocation, and they are moved by wires attached to their heads and extremities. The largest are only about half the height of a man, yet as the stage and all the appointments and scenery are upon the same scale of proportion, the eye is soon deceived, and accepts them as of life-size. But if by accident a hand or arm of one of the wire-pullers appears from behind the scenes or descends below the hangings, it startles you by its portentous size; and the audience in the stage-boxes instead of reducing the _burattini_ to Lilliputians by contrast, as they lean forward, become themselves Brobdingnagians, with elephantine hands and heads."