Story insisted that there is nothing ludicrous to an Italian audience in the performances of these diminutive men and women. On the contrary, nothing is more serious both to the spectators and to the unforeseen operators. In fact, he declared, no human being could be so serious as these tiny performers. "Their countenances are as solemn as death, and more unchanging than the face of a clock. Their terrible gravity when, with drooping heads and collapsed arms, they fix on you their great goggle-eyes is at times ghastly. The plays they perform are mostly heroic, romantic, and historical. They stoop to nothing which is not startling in incident, imposing in style, and grandiose in movement. And the Italian audience listens with a grave and profound interest, as tho the performers were not mere puppets, but actually the heroes they are supposed to be. The inflated and extravagant discourse of the characters is accepted at its face value; to the spectators it is grand and noble. And the foreign visitor must control any desire he may feel to smile at the extraordinary spectacle he is witnessing, and at the marvelous rodomontade he is hearing. To laugh out loud at one of these heroic puppet-plays would be as indecorous as to indulge in laughter during a church service." [Illustration: A Belgian puppet A Chinese puppet theater Puppet figure representing the younger Coquelin] Incidental to the heroic dramas which the puppets play are interludes of ballet-dancing like those which are intercalated, more or less adroitly, into the grand opera performed by full-grown men and women. The Italians are born pantomimists, and they are accomplished dancers. Therefore, there is no reason for surprise that human pantomime and human dancing are imitated in the marionette theaters. There is reason for surprise, however, that Story did not perceive clearly the advantages possessed by the dancing puppets over the dancers of more solid flesh and blood. He found something comic in the pantomime of the puppets, "whose every motion is effected by wires, who imitate the gestures of despair with hands that cannot shut, and, with a wooden gravity of countenance, throw their bodies into terrible contortions to make up for the lack of expression in the face." In mere pantomime it is probable that the puppets would labor under a serious disability, for if a performer cannot use his voice, he needs facial expression to assist the gestures by which only can he then convey his meaning to the other performers and to the spectators. Perhaps it is not too much to assert that the puppet-show is not the proper place for pantomime. III