Of course, we talked of her favorite characters in opera, and then of singers she has known. She said it would give her real pleasure to hear Mario and Grisi again, or, coming to later days, Scalchi and Annie Louise Cary. The latter being an American and a friend, I was glad to hear this appreciation of her from the Queen of Song. “Cary and Scalchi were the two greatest contraltos I have ever known; and I have sung with both of them. I remember Annie Louise Cary as a superb artist, and a sweet and noble woman.” I said “Hear, hear,” in the parliamentary manner, and then Patti added: “Now we will go into the theatre again. There is to be another entertainment.” It was, of all unexpected things, a magic-lantern show. Patti’s magic-lantern is like everything else at Craig-y-Nos, from her piano to her pet parrot, the only one of its kind. It is capable of giving, with all sorts of “mechanical effects,” a two-hours’ entertainment every night for two months without repeating a scene. Patti invited me to sit beside her and watch the dissolving views. It seemed to me that it would be like this to sit by the queen during a “state performance” at Windsor. Here was Patti Imperatrice, dressed like a queen, wearing a crown of diamonds, and attended by her retinue of brilliantly attired women and attentive gentlemen of the court. And it was so like her to cause the entertainment to begin with a series of American views, and to hum softly a verse of “Home, Sweet Home,” as we looked out upon New York harbor from an imaginary steamship inward bound.
THE PROSCENIUM OF CRAIG-Y-NOS THEATER.
The next morning I started from Craig-y-Nos for America. As the dog-cart was tugged slowly up the mountain-side the Stars and Stripes saluted me from the castle tower, waving farewell as I withdrew from my peep at paradise.
ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER.
By “Q.”
Early last fall there died in Troy an old man and his wife. The woman went first, and the husband took a chill at her grave’s edge, when he stood bareheaded in a lashing shower. The loose earth crumbled under his feet, trickling over, and dropped on her coffin-lid. Through two long nights he lay on his bed without sleeping, and listened to this sound. At first it ran in his ears perpetually, but afterwards he heard it at intervals only, in the pauses of acute suffering. On the seventh day he died, of pleuro-pneumonia; and on the tenth (a Sunday) they buried him. For just fifty years the dead man had been minister of the Independent chapel on the hill, and had laid down his pastorate two years before, on his golden wedding day. Consequently there was a funeral sermon, and the young man, his successor, chose II. Samuel, i. 23, for his text: “Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.” Himself a newly married man, he waxed dithyrambic on the sustained affection and accord of the departed couple. “Truly,” he wound up, “such marriages as theirs were made in heaven.” And could they have heard, the two bodies in the cemetery had not denied it; but the woman, after the fashion of women, would have qualified the young minister’s assertion in her secret heart.