The silver badge represents a discharge for wounds. Crumps are, of course, shells.

Louise Sounders:  THE KNAVE OF HEARTS

The Knave of Hearts is one of the happy tradition of puppet-plays, which come down in unbroken line from the most ancient history, through the illustrious Dr. Faustus and Mr. Punch, to new and even greater favor and fame to-day.  For just as the ancient puppet-shows of Italy and England seemed to be losing ground before the moving-picture invasion, they have been heroically rescued by Mr. Tony Sarg,—­whose performance of Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring is perfectly absurd and captivating,—­and by other excellent artists.

Puppet-shows are delightful because they are easily made and quite convincing.  Very good ones have been improvised even by tiny children, with a pasteboard suit-box opening to the front, a slit at the top to 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