does not know them; tries to
peep. Mother reproves; makes boy kneel; prepares to whip; whips. Mother
weeps; boy catches flies on the floor; bites her finger.

Enter cook to see what the noise means. Cook takes boy to task. Boy
stops his ears. Cook bawls. Cook kneels to lady; reproves her also;
tells her she must keep her own temper, if she would train her boy.

Lady sulks, naturally. Boy slips behind and cuts her work out of her
embroidery frame. Cook attacks boy. Cook sings a lament, and goes out to
attend to dinner; but returns in frantic distress. During his absence
everything has boiled over; everything has been burned to a crisp.
Dinner is ruined. Cook now reconciles mother and son; drags son to his
knees; makes him repeat words of supplication. While he does this cook
turns his back to the audience, takes off his beard carefully, lays it
on the floor, while he drinks a cupful of tea.

This is all, literally all. It took an hour and a half. The audience
listened with intensest interest. The gesticulations, the expressions of
face, the tones of the actors, all conveyed the idea of the deepest
tragedy. Except for our interpreter, I should have taken the cook for a
soothsayer, priest, a highwayman and murderer, alternately. I should
have supposed that all the dangers, hopes, fears, delights possible in
the lives of three human beings were going on on that stage. Now we saw
how very far-fetched and preposterous had probably been our theories of
the play we had seen before, we having constructed a most brilliant plot
from our interpretation of the pantomime.

After this domestic drama came a fierce spectacular play, too absurd to
be described, in which nations went to war because a king's monkey had
been killed. And the kings and their armies marched in at one door and
out at the other, sat on gilt thrones, fought with gilt swords, tumbled
each other head over heels with as much vigor and just as much art as
small boys play the battle of Bunker Hill with the nursery chairs on a
rainy day. But the dresses of these warlike monarchs were gorgeous and
fantastic beyond description. Long, gay-colored robes, blazoned and
blazing with gold and silver embroidery; small flags, two on each side,
stuck in at their shoulders, and projecting behind; helmets, square
breastplates of shining stones, and such decorations with feathers as
pass belief. Several of them had behind each ear a long, slender
bird-of-Paradise feather. These