ke "_Moecht tich mit tier_." Anything of that sort among
colleagues is looked upon as a tremendous joke, especially when it is on
the director.

One result of his former glory was that famous people came to this
theatre to _gastieren_ and it also seemed to us as if every former
singer or actor in Germany of any pretension to fame, who had a son or
daughter to launch in either profession, sent them to our director for a
debut. This was looked upon by us as a bore; but the famous guests were
rather amusing, because when they had gone, the director used to relate
all kinds of derogatory stories about them. Possart---- Ritter, Ernst
von---- was perhaps the most renowned. He came to recite Manfred at a
special performance with our soloists and chorus. The director told us
how, during the most impassioned speeches of Goethe or Shakespeare his
eye would be on the upper gallery, counting empty places, and how after
the performance when the box office sheet showed an _ausverkauftes Haus_
he would demand, "What about those three empty seats in the second row
of the top gallery, at the left?"

He told a similar tale of a famous Austrian guest-artist, the leading
Teutonic exponent of his day of the negative side in the never-ending
argument of stage technique "to feel or not to feel." He had mechanical
as well as histrionic genius, and his dramatic art had become so
mechanical too, towards the end of his career, that he could utilize
such places in his great parts as Hamlet's soliloquy for thinking out
scientific puzzles, although his power over the emotions of his audience
never lost its effect.

[Illustration: AMNERIS AS I NOW DRESS IT]

The director's own story was a real romance. While still on the upward
side of the hill of fame, he had met and loved the wife of a nobleman,
the scion of an ancient house. She had been maid-of-honour at the most
exclusive court in Europe, the confidante of the royal family, and
was said to know the true story of many of the mysterious incidents in
court history. In fact she was supposed to have been married off
hurriedly to her much older husband to get her away from the royal
circle of whose secrets she knew altogether too many. The infatuation of
the singer for the lady was mutual, and in course of time a boy was born
to them, who reached the age of six years before the noble husband
consented to divorce his wife, or rather, I think, his lawyers consented
for him, as by that time dissipati