While I was listening, in fancy, to the Song of the Steppe, which this magnificent operative was shouting, rather than singing, in the rude joy of his work, I was roused by a cry of “Deptford!—Any one for Deptford? Ease her; stop her!”
I sprang from the bench on which I had been reclining, and the world burst upon me again.
“Deptford—any one for Deptford?” cried the captain, standing on the paddle-box. None answered the call, but a whole fleet of wherries came skimming along the surge, and threw a crowd of fresh passengers, with trunks and carpet-bags numberless, on board. The traveller of taste always feels himself instinctively drawn to one object out of the thousand, and my observation was fixed on one foreign-featured female, who sat in her wherry wrapt up in an envelope of furs and possessing a pair of most lustrous eyes.
A sallow Italian, who stood near me, looking over the side of the vessel, exclaimed, “Fanni Pellmello,” and the agility with which she sprang up the steps was worthy of the name of that most celebrated daughter of “the muse who presides over dancing,” as the opera critics have told us several million times.
The sallow Italian was passed with a smile of recognition, which put him in good spirits at once. Nothing vivifies the tongue of a foreigner like the memory of the Coulisses, and he over-flowed upon me with the history of this terrestrial Terpsichore. It happened that he was in Rome at the time of that memorable levee at which Fanny, in all her captivations, paid her obeisance at the Vatican; an event which notoriously cost a whole coterie of princesses the bursting of their stay-laces, through sheer envy, and on whose gossip the haut ton of the “Eternal City” have subsisted ever since.
The Italian, in his rapture, and with the vision of the danseuse still shining before him at the poop, began to improvise the presentation. All the world is aware that Italian prose slides into rhyme of itself,—that all subjects turn to verse in the mind of the Italian, and that, when once on his Pegasus, he gallops up hill and down, snatches at every topic in his way, has no mercy on antiquity, and would introduce King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, dancing a quadrille with Prince Albert and Queen Victoria.
THE PRESENTATION.
The month was September,
The day I remember,
(’Twas the congé of Clara Novello),
I saw troops under arms,
Dragoons and gendarmes,
Saluting sweet Fanny Pellmello.
At St Peter’s last chime
A chorus sublime
(By-the-by, from Rossini’s Otello),
Was sung by Soprani,
In homage to Fanny,
The light footed Fanny Pellmello.
As she rush’d on their gaze,
The Swiss-guard in amaze,
Thought they might as well stand a Martello;
All their muskets they dropp’d,
On their knees they all popp’d,
To worship sweet Fanny Pellmello.