let down paper-doll actors on a thread, a bit
of scenery, outdoors or in, drawn as background, and a showman to
talk for all the characters. Still better puppets are doll heads
and arms of various sorts, dressed in flowing robes and provided
with holes for two fingers and a thumb of the operator, who moves
them from below. They can be made to dance and antic as you like
on a stage above the showman's head, as Punch and Judy have
always done. The more elaborate marionettes are worked with
strings from above, so that they can open and close their mouths
and otherwise act most realistically; these are, of course, more
difficult, but quite possible to make. In such simple theatres,
Goethe and Robert Louis Stevenson and many other famous people
played themselves endless stories. If you want to pursue this
idea further, a list of references below gives you opportunity
for all the information you like about marionettes and puppets.

_The Knave of Hearts_ is charming, either as a puppet-play or, as
a class in junior high school gave it recently, a "legitimate
drama." The remarks of the manager are all the funnier when
applied to real characters. The play explains clearly the reasons
for the strange behavior of a respectable nursery character. It
is to be published soon in a book of its own with illustrations
by Mr. Maxfield Parrish (Scribner's). The author has written
other plays and stories, some of which you may have seen in _St.
Nicholas_, and also a pleasant operetta, with music by Alice
Terhune--_The Woodland_ _Princess_, listed in the bibliography
following. She is also an actress with the New York Comedy Club,
an excellent amateur organization.

Pompdebile's coat of arms, with a heart rampant (i.e., standing
on its hind legs, however that may be accomplished), reminds one
of the arms suggested for the old clergyman-scholar, Mr.
Casaubon, in George Eliot's _Middlemarch_--"three cuttlefish
sable and a commentator rampant."

_Lord Dunsany_: FAME AND THE POET

Lord Dunsany (Edward Moreton Max Plunkett), the eighteenth baron
of his name, is the author of a number of stories and plays unique
in their type of clever imaginativeness. Besides the inimitable
Five Plays and other dramas listed in the bibliography, his best
writings are to be found in _Fifty-One Tales_, which includes "The
Hen," "Death and Odysseus," "The True Story of the Hare and the
Tortoise," and other highly entertaining matters. _Fame and the
Poet_,