I found him a dear old man indeed, but one who had nothing to say
to me on the subject of voice production which I had not heard already.
However, I decided to begin the study of German repertoire with him,
painstakingly re-learning the operas I already knew in French, and
adding the new ones required for a German engagement. Later I found a
good _repetiteur_, who knew the operas thoroughly, quite sufficient and
much cheaper, as he charged only four marks ($1.00) an hour. I studied
the words of my roles with Herr----'s wife, who had been an actress and
a good one, and who laid the foundation of what I am proud to say is now
a perfect German accent. These lessons were five marks an hour and were
quite worth it. I would learn a role by heart, sentence by sentence,
looking up every word in the dictionary and writing in the translation
over the German, spending hours in fruitless search for a past
participle which did not look as if it belonged to its infinitive, the
only part of the verb, of course, to be given in the dictionary! Then,
sentence by sentence, I would go over it with Frau----, repeating each
word after her, sometimes twenty times! We also used those splendid
books, known I found afterwards to every German actor, in which
paragraphs of words with the same vowel sound or combination of vowel
and consonants are given to be repeated over and over again. Besides
this drudgery, I had German lessons for four months (at three marks or
seventy-five cents) for which I had to translate and write exercises.
All the labyrinths of the declension of articles, nouns and adjectives
in three genders and plurals, lay before me to be explored. The datives
and accusatives haunted my dreams by night, and by day I was reduced to
the sign language.

I had left my first pension, and crushing down the temptation to live in
one of the big, gay German-American pensions, where justice is tempered
with mercy, so to speak, I moved myself and my piano into a real German
one, where I was the only alien. It was one floor of a large house in a
quiet side street--the top floor, and no elevator! I climbed
eighty-seven steps by actual count every time I came home from a lesson.
I had a huge room, heated by steam, with board for four marks a day. The
meals were _echt Deutsch_. Breakfast was set ready on the dining-room
table at some unearthly hour, and the guests went in and helped
themselves when they chose. The coffee and hot milk were kept warm