In the first place the performance of these marionettes compelled my whole-hearted interest because the play was detached from life, was not palpably unreal under the artificial light, and therefore could begin to reflect and be a comment upon life in a degree of success dependent, of course, upon the mind behind it. It was a common but a simple mind, skilled in the uses of the tiny theater, versed in its tradition, and always nice in its perception of the degrees of emotion proper to be loosed for the building up of the dramatic scenes. It was not truly an imaginative mind, not a genuinely dramatic mind, but it was thoroughly loyal to the imagination which has created and developed the theater of the marionettes. Except that the showman had a marked preference for the doll who played the husband, the balance of the play was excellently maintained, and the marionettes did exactly as they were bid. Thus between the controlling mind of the theater, the mind in its tradition, and my own there was set up a continuous and unbroken communication, and my brain was kept most exaltingly busy drawing on those forces and passions, those powers of selection and criticism which make of man a reasoning and then a dramatic animal. You may be sure that I fed the drama on the stage with that other drama, through which you and I floundered so many years ago. I longed to cry out to the husband that he should think less of himself and what the neighbors would say and more of his wife, who, being between two men, enamored of one and dedicated to the other, was in a far worse plight than himself, who was torn only between his affection and his pride. But tradition and convention and his own brainless subservience to his passion were too strong for him, and he killed the lover; would have killed the woman, too, but she was too quick for him. I wept, I assure you. I was sorrowful. Judge, then, of my relief and delight when the curtain rose again and those same three puppets, with others, played the merriest burlesque, a starveling descendant, I fancy, of the _commedia dell' arte._ Where before they had surrendered to their passions, now my three puppets played with them at nimble knucklebones. The passion was no less genuine, but this time they were its masters, not its slaves, they had it casked and bunged and could draw on it at will. My lady puppet coquetted with the two gentlemen, set them wrangling for her, wagering, dicing, singing, dancing, vying with each other in mischievous tricks upon the town, and at last, owing, I suspect, to the showman's partiality, she sank into the husband puppet's arms and the lover puppet was propelled by force of leg through the window. (Pray, my dear Panoukian, admire the euphemism to spare both our feelings.) And now I laughed as healthily and heartily as before I wept. . . . Now, said I to myself, in England I should have been tormented with a picture, cut up by the insincerity of the actors into