“‘Bury’ yourself! On the contrary, you have here all the charms of life, and you seem to have discovered the fountain of perpetual youth. A ‘dreadful’ place? Indeed, it is a paradise in miniature!”
“But one of your countrymen says that I hide far from the world among the ugly Welsh hills. He writes it in an American journal of fabulous circulation, and I suppose people believe the tale, do they not?” La Diva laughed heartily at the thought of a too credulous public, and then she added: “Really, they do write the oddest things about my home, as if it were either the scene of Jack the Giant-killer’s exploits on the top of the Beanstalk, or a prison in a desolate land.”
After visiting Patti at Craig-y-Nos one need no longer wonder why this enchanting woman sings “Home, Sweet Home” with such feeling. For she inhabits a paradise. There is not anywhere a lovelier spot, nor is there elsewhere a place so remote and at the same time so complete in attractiveness, and in every resource of civilization.
The dinner passed on merrily. Merrily is exactly the word to describe it. Up and down the table good stories flew, sometimes faster than we could catch them. Nobody likes a good joke better than Patti, and when she heard one that particularly pleased her she would interpret it to some guest who had not sufficiently mastered the language in which the original anecdote was told. It was delightful comedy, and after watching it with high pleasure, while La Diva spoke in a brace of languages, I said: “I wonder if you have what people call a native tongue, or whether in all of them you are ‘native and to the manner born’?”
“Oh, I don’t know so many,” she replied, “only—let’s see—English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Russian.”
“And which language do you speak best, if I may ask?”
“I really don’t know. To me there is no difference, as far as readiness goes, and I suppose that in all of them readiness helps.”
MADAME PATTI’S FATHER.
“But you have a favorite among them?”