puppet-showman's

Updated: May 13, 2025

"On the word of a gentleman, I see nothing illusive in the wretchedly bedaubed sheet of canvas that forms your background, or in these pasteboard slips that hitch and jerk along the front. The only illusion, permit me to say, is in the puppet-showman's tongue, and that but a wretched one, into the bargain!"

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Main Street: (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")