my role of female Wandering Jew! You have to think of Glory now, dear
people, in a nice house in St. John's Wood, though there is no wood
anywhere visible except the park, where they keep all the wild beasts in
London--all that go on four legs, you know. The master of the mansion is
Mr. Carl Koenig, a dear old hippopotamus who is five-feet-nothing in his
boots, and has piercing black eyes and an electroplated mustache. He is a
sort of an English-German-Dutch-Polish musician. When he talks of himself
as an organist he is always a little John Bull, being F. R. C. O. and
lots of things besides; when he speaks of 'Vaterland' he is a German;
when he mentions the sea he is a Dutchman; and when he is in good spirits
(or they are in him) he sings 'Poland is not lost forever!' all over the
house until you sometimes wish it were.

"His wife is an Englishwoman, about forty or more, with big, moist, doggy
eyes that give you an idea of slave-humility, and an unappreciated and
undeveloped soul. There never were two married folk less alike, she being
one of those silent creatures who come into a room and sit and listen and
never speak, except to give instructions to the maids, while he is always
cackling like an old hen who can never lay an egg without letting the
whole world know all about it. They have two female servants--both
beautiful Cockneys--besides a boy in the garden, and a parrot that holds
forth all over the place; and their house is the rendezvous of all kinds
and conditions of great people, for Mr. Koenig himself is a sort of
Gideon's lamp among 'pros' of nearly every order.

"And now you want to know how I come to be here. You are to learn then
that Mr. Koenig happened to be one of my patients in the hospital, he
having gone there for a slight operation, and I having helped to nurse
him through what he calls his 'operatic cure.' In the course of that
ordeal he had music of a less excruciating kind sometimes, it seems, and
after his return home he searched for me all over London on account of my
voice, and finding me unexpectedly at last he sent his wife to Mrs.
Jupe's to fetch me, and--and here I am in a dainty little dimity room,
whose walls are covered with portraits of well-known singers, violinists,
pianists, and composers, with their affectionate inscriptions underneath.

"But you want to learn why I am here. Well, you must know that Mr. Koenig
(although a foreign musician) is organist of All Saints', Belgravia,