II There are a score of other little plays like the 'Broken Bridge,' adroitly adjusted to the caliber of the juvenile mind. In a British collection may be found a piece representing a succession of appalling episodes supposed to take place in a 'Haunted House,' and in a French manual for the use of youthful amateurs may be discovered a rudimentary version of Molière's 'Imaginary Invalid,' to be performed by silhouettes with articulated limbs. Here again we perceive the inaccuracy of the term "shadow-pantomime," since the most of the figures are not articulated, and, being motionless, they are deprived of the freedom of gesture which is the essential element of true pantomime. Moreover, they are all made to take part in various dialogs, and this again is a negation of the fundamental principle of pantomime, which ought to be wordless. Here the French term "Chinese shadows" is more exact and less limiting than the English "shadow-pantomime." It is perhaps a pity that the old-fashioned term "gallanty-show," has not won a wider acceptance in English. The little pieces due to Séraphin and his humble followers in France and in England, devised to amuse children only, were simple enough in plot, and yet they were sufficient to suggest to admirers of this unpretending form of theatrical art plays of a more imposing proportion. M. Paul Eudel, the art critic, has published an amply illustrated volume in which he collected the fairy-pieces, and the more spectacular melodramas composed by his grandfather in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, in the dark days that preceded Waterloo. And in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, in the dark days that preceded Sedan, M. Lemercier de Neuville, relinquishing for a while the Punch and Judy puppets which he called _Pupazzi_, and which he had exhibited in a succession of gentle caricatures of Parisian personalities with a mildly Aristophanic flavor of contemporary satire, turned to the familiar Chinese shadows of his childhood and devised what he called his _Pupazzi noirs_, animated shadows. He also has issued a collection of these little pieces with a full explanation of the method of performance and with half a hundred illustrations, revealing all the secrets of maneuvering the little figures. Indeed, Lemercier de Neuville's manual is the most ample which has yet appeared; and it is the most interesting in that he was at once his own playwright, his own designer of figures, and his own performer. [Illustration: The return from the Bois de Boulogne Four shadow pictures by Caran d'Ache] [Illustration: The ballet From a shadow picture by Lemercier de Neuville] [Illustration: _Reproduced by permission of Hachette & Co., Paris_ A regiment of French soldiers From a shadow picture by R. de La Nézière]