a heavenly ride. In the west a little army of thin blue clouds
was edged with blazing gold, and up between them spread great fan-like
shafts of amber light. Then came a riot of orange yellow and ashes of
roses and the palest of gold with little islands of azure in it. Then
while the dying radiance seemed to hold everything in a luminous wash of
air, the stars came out, one by one, and a soft cool wind swept across
the prairie, and the light darkened--and I was glad to have Dinky-Dunk
there at my side, or I should have had a little cry, for the twilight
prairie always makes me lonesome in a way that could never be put into
words.

I tried to explain the feeling to Dinky-Dunk. He said he understood.
"I'm a Sour-Dough, Gee-Gee, but it still gets me that way," he solemnly
confessed. He said that when he listened to beautiful music he felt the
same. And that got me thinking of grand opera, and of that _Romeo and
Juliet_ night at La Scala, in Milan, when I first met Theobald Gustav.
Then I stopped to tell Dinky-Dunk that I'd been hopelessly in love with
a tenor at thirteen and had written in my journal: "I shall die and turn
to dust still adoring him." Then I told him about my first opera,
_Rigoletto_, and hummed "_La Donna E Mobile_," which of course he
remembered himself. It took me back to Florence, and to a box at the
Pagliano, and me all in dimity and cork-screw curls, weeping deliciously
at a lady in white, whose troubles I could not quite understand. Then I
got thinking of New York and the Metropolitan, and poor old Morris's
lines:

And still with listening soul I hear
Strains hushed for many a noisy year:
The passionate chords which wake the tear,
The low-voiced love-tales dear....

Scarce changed, the same musicians play
The selfsame themes to-day;
The silvery swift sonatas ring,
The soaring voices sing!

And I could picture the old Metropolitan on a Caruso night. I could see
the Golden Horse-Shoe and the geranium-red trimmings and the satiny
white backs of the women, and smell that luxurious heavy smell of warm
air and hothouse flowers and Paris perfumery and happy human bodies and
hear the whisper of silk along the crimson stairways. I could see the
lights go down, in a sort of sigh, before the overture began, and the
scared-looking blotches of white on the musicians' scores and the other
blotches made by their dress-shirt fronts, and the violins going up and
down, up and down, as though the