"Yes; I have not visited it, but I hear it is interesting."
So they entered the well-filled hall just as the performance was beginning, and were fortunate enough to find seats near the stage. At both sides of the latter were placed rows of puppets with grotesque faces, featured like the masks worn by most of the actors. At the back of the stage were ranged the musicians, sitting cross-legged in rows before their highly ornamented instruments. These were soft-toned gongs, bells, and strings of strange fashion, and instead of being solely noticeable for rhythm, like most of the music of the Midway, one heard from this orchestra plaintive harmonies and cadences which seemed but an amplification of the minor pleading in the water-wheel's play.
The curtained entrances at the side back of the stage looked too small and low to admit the actors, but there was room and to spare even for the men, and still more for the dainty brown dancing-girls who soon glided forth. They were exceedingly pretty and graceful, dressed in gold-embroidered velvet trousers to the knee, and short skirts. Their dimpled shoulders and arms were bare, and their fringed sashes were used to fling over their wrists in the fascinating monotonous gestures with which they pointed their little hands as they stepped about in their white-stockinged feet.
The performance was all in pantomime, the lines being read by some one hidden behind a screen in the centre of the stage. The orchestra men in their calico gowns and turbans often smiled at some sally of the clown; but Clover and Page did not need to comprehend in order to be amused. There was something tenderly comical in the pompous movements of the little people gesturing in stiff, studied fashion. From time to time the dancing-girls would appear, gliding hither and yon, and posing to the tinkling music.
"This is surprisingly pretty," said Page.
"I want one of those brown girls to take home as bricabrac," returned Clover. "Aren't they the roundest, prettiest little creatures! Really, the whole thing seems strange enough to be a sight in fairy-land; and do you hear that enchanting rustle of trees above our heads?"
The light summer breeze was stirring the dried straw and grass that thatched the roof, with the lulling effect of wind in a forest.
"I am enchanted, I admit," answered Gorham.
After the play they walked about the village, among the houses where the little inhabitants sat upon their piazzas and sang, or talked, or rested silently.
"I shall never see such a reposeful place again," said Gorham, when at last they passed out beneath the bamboo arch into the turbulent street. "I should like to prolong that experience indefinitely."