The folding-doors that led into the central hall flew open, and disclosed on the threshold, illuminated by lamps at the sides, and standing on a framework draped in red, a puppet-theatre that occupied almost the entire width of the space. The table was quickly pushed to one side, and the chairs for the spectators were arranged in rows. After everybody had taken his place, a short prelude was played upon a flute behind the scenes; and then the curtain in front of the little stage rose, and a puppet in a dress-coat and black knee-breeches, carrying his hat in his hand--with the air of a director who has an official communication to make, or of a dramatic poet who has held himself in readiness behind the wings, to respond in case he should possibly be called before the footlights--delivered a rhymed prologue. In this he greeted the associates, and, after lamenting in half-satirical, half-serious stanzas, the decline of art and of the love of the beautiful, introduced his troop of players, of whom he especially boasted that no modern strifes or heartburnings ever invaded their temple, or kept them from a pure and lofty devotion to the Muses. His speech concluded, the little man made a dignified obeisance, and the curtain fell, to be again drawn up after a few moments, upon the little drama that had been prepared for the amusement of the company. It bore the title of "The Wicked Brothers," and was in reality but the introduction to a longer play, designed to be produced upon some future evening. In rhyming verses it set forth the history of a musician, an artist, and a poet--three brothers who had been left at the foundling-asylum of a little village, and had grown up to become the curse of the region with their pranks; a very demon of evil-doing appearing to possess them, and their parentage remaining an impenetrable mystery to the quiet village folk. To them, after some of the worst of their misdeeds, and just as the villagers were about to wreak their vengeance on them, appeared no less a personage than the devil himself, revealing to them that he was their father, and that he had called them into being that they might work the ruin of the human race. This said, he summoned them away with him to undertake their mission in a larger field than this of their apprenticeship. And here the action left them; the fantastic little piece closing at last with a short epilogue by the same puppet who had introduced the play, his final verses promising the Paradise associates that on some other night they should enjoy a view of the results of this deep plot against their kind, but hinting, nevertheless, that they should see how, in the end, the true and beautiful should triumph, and the fell scheming of the brothers and their father should be brought to naught. CHAPTER IV.