gh there are some operas in which a meal "comes before" as the
Germans say. In the "Merry Wives of Windsor" for example, the scene
containing _Anna's_ letter aria opens with the company at supper in
_Frau Reich's_ home. The wives are explaining their tricks and plotting
_Falstaff's_ final discomfiture in spoken dialogue. One night when I was
singing _Frau Reich_ in Metz there was a particularly attractive dish of
real apples on the stage supper table. The _Herr Reich_ was the serious
bass, a thrifty individual who couldn't bear to let a penny's worth of
anything escape him. As his guests rose to go he picked up the dish of
apples and pressed it upon them.

"Here," he improvised, "take these home to the children. Oh! You have no
children--well, take them anyway--the children will come later."

His hospitable wishes were received with bewilderment by the audience,
but as he made his exit with his guests and immediately began to eat the
apples, he bore his scolding from the _regisseur_ very philosophically.
On some stages where the provisions are more elaborate, the actors in
certain plays make a regular practise of eating their suppers on the
stage. In "Divorcons" for example or in the "Anatol Cyclus" of
Schnitzler.

Our property man in Metz, with the historic Shakespearean name of
Mondenschein, (Moonshine) was an ardent lover of drapery. An
artistocratic interior, to his mind, must be entirely filled with as
many different materials as possible, all hanging in folds. He had three
pairs of near-silk portieres, bright pink, dull green, and pale yellow,
and the combinations that he made with those six curtains were endless.
Garlands of roses, too, were a great resource of his--draped round a
couch with a fur rug upon it, and a red light over all, they transformed
the scene into the bower of a Messalina. In a white light festooned
upon a mantel-piece, or above a doorway, they could be depended upon to
supply the appropriate setting of the _Erste Naive's_ most appealing
scene. The young lovehaveress and first salon lady, had to receive them,
wired together into a bunch, with the same delightful surprise, and put
them into the same Japanese jar without any water in it, in play after
play. But the property man always squandered a perfectly new, uncreased
piece of paper for every performance with which to make a cornucopia for
them, in the approved German style. He was quite a specialist in such
matters as the colour of telegr