A second reaction comes to one while loitering with the images in their jerking procession. Each image, with its absolute minimum of words, has two clear virtues—the expression of emotion half-human and half artificial, and the concentration of just enough of this emotion to produce an illusion of the whole. Consider this speech of the sprite motif: Tiptoe a-tread—thru the wood—by the brook—the sprite enters—oh, ho! Dance, crinkled stream! Ha; a dragon-fly poised upon air. (_Blows_) ... Begone. (_Reflectively_) It is night. (_Bowing_) Madame Owl. Hoot! To-whoo! An actual sprite-soul in life would babble, would use more extravagant phrasing. In this sprite passage, just enough of the babbling and exuberance has been given, to suggest the essence of it; just enough words have been given, to suggest the steady motion of the invisible strings. These qualities run throughout the speeches of all the über-marionettes. Book Discussion _Plays for Small Stages, by Mary Aldis. New York: Duffield and Company._ These plays are among those acted by the Lake Forest Players, and, written especially for them, they exemplify certain qualities of drama and stage-craft which are of special value in amateur production. First of all they are real in situation. Two of the five, _Mrs. Pat and the Law_ and _Extreme Unction_, deal with slum life, but with phases of it which the amateur can study at first hand, and is, indeed, the better for studying. The juxtaposition in both types of the submerged tenth and the reachers of helping hands suggests that the plays have in fact, grown out of such study. The former sketch is done with a brilliancy of Irish humor and fancy that reminds the reader of Lady Gregory’s best. The latter is the grim tragedy of a dying prostitute—a situation relieved first by the mordant irony of the conventional religious pouncet-box of the well-meaning lady visitor, and later by the sympathetic imagination of the physician. A third play, _The Drama Class_, presents with broad humor an occasion familiar to all uplifters of the drama in regions which on the “culture map” are lightly shaded—the discussion of a modern European play by a woman’s club. _The Letter_ and _Temperament_ represent the maladjustments of monogamy—the one with tragic emphasis, the other in pure farce. The point should be noted, however, that all five are plays of situation, static rather than dynamic, expository and revealing rather than developing—the type most suited to the dimensions of the one-act play, and made familiar by the playwrights of the Abbey and Manchester Theatres. As Mrs. Aldis says in her preface, speaking of the general policy of the Lake Forest Players: “In selecting plays we have departed radically from the amateur tradition of resuscitating ‘plays with a punch,’ which have fared well in the hands of professionals.