l, and gazing into vacancy. As soon as the
audience had had time to recover, Alice entered, and the
conversation was carried on just as it is in the book.
Humpty Dumpty gesticulated with his arms, rolled his eyes,
raised his eyebrows, frowned, turned up his nose in scorn at
Alice's ignorance, and smiled from ear to ear when he shook
hands with her. Besides this, his mouth kept time with his
words all through the dialogue, which added very greatly to
his life-like appearance.

The effect of his huge face, as it changed from one
expression to another, was ludicrous in the extreme, and we
were often obliged to repeat sentences in the conversation
(to "go back to the last remark but one") because the
audience laughed so loudly over Humpty Dumpty's expression
of face that they drowned what he was trying to say. The
funniest effect was the change from the look of
self-satisfied complacency with which he accompanied the
words: "The king has promised me--" to that of towering rage
when Alice innocently betrays her knowledge of the secret.
At the close of the scene, when Alice has vainly endeavoured
to draw him into further conversation, and at last walks
away in disgust, Humpty loses his balance on the wall,
recovers himself, totters again, and then falls off
backwards; at the same time a box full of broken glass is
dropped on the floor behind the scenes, to represent the
"heavy crash," which "shook the forest from end to
end";--and the curtain falls.

Now, as to how it was all done. Humpty was made of barrel
hoops, and covered with stiff paper and muslin. His eyes
were round balls of rags, covered with muslin, drawn
smoothly, and with the pupil and iris marked on the front.
These eyes were pivoted to a board, fastened just behind the
eye-openings in the face. To the eyeballs were sewed strong
pieces of tape, which passed through screw-eyes on the edges
of the board, and so down to a row of levers which were
hinged in the lower part of the figure. One lever raised
both eyes upward, another moved them both to the left, and
so on. The eyebrows were of worsted and indiarubber knitted
together. They were fastened at the ends, and raised and
lowered by fine white threads passing through small holes in
the face, and also operated by levers. The arms projected
into th