"I am sure you could," I answered, upon which she tried it. She sang it slowly but perfectly, shutting her eyes as if feeling her way cautiously, for the intonations are very difficult.
Twelve o'clock sounded from a cuckoo-clock in the next room, and I felt that my visit, fascinating as my angel was, must come to an end. I left her still standing on the veranda in her white brocade, and as I walked off she made the trill as an adieu.
I reached the villa in time for breakfast, after which our hosts drove us down to the pier, where the little rowboat was waiting to take us out to the yacht.
I said that our trip was a failure! It was more than a failure. It meant a gale, thunder, lightning, and sudden death, and everything in the Litany, and we finished ignominiously by taking refuge in the first port we could reach, and going on to our destination by train.
PARIS, February 12, 1866.
DEAR AUNTY,—There has been a regular deluge of balls in Paris this winter. The Minister of Marine gave a gorgeous one, the clou of which was the entrance at midnight precisely of Les Quatres Continents, being four long cortèges representing Europe, America, Africa, and Asia.
I was quite provoked that they did not ask me to be in the American cortège. I should have loved to have been an Indian squaw, except that a blanket is a rather warm toilette de bal. They wanted me to take a costume of a Spanish lady in the cortège of Europe, but I refused; if I could not be in the American I did not want to be in any of the others.
Taking part in the cortège meant waiting till midnight before appearing, and then, being in it, you did not see it. I had a banal and not a correct costume of an Amazone Louis XIII., and stayed in the ballroom all the evening, and saw the procession when it came in. It was very interesting and really beautifully arranged.
Africa (Mademoiselle de Sèvres) was brought in on a camel fresh from the jungle of the Jardin des Plantes, and followed by quantities of natives of every variety of shade, from sepia to chocolate, as near to nature as they dared go without spoiling their beauty. Some of the costumes were very fantastic. Ladies dressed in skirts made of feathers, and beads hanging everywhere, copied after well-known pictures, and especially after the costumes of "l'Africaine," of the Opera. The men wore enormous wigs made of black wool, and black tricots, blacker than the most African of negroes.
Asia (Baronne Erlanger) was standing on a platform carried by menials hidden from view and smothered under tiger and other skins. She was poised with one foot on the head of a tiger, one hand was clutching a date-tree, and the other hand clinging to the back of a stuffed leopard, it must have been difficult for her to keep her balance; her platform seemed very shaky, and the date-tree waved as if it had been in a tornado. The natives who followed her were more beaded and feathery and multicolored than the Africans, otherwise they looked much alike.