ck, recording volumes he had gathered; and the operas,
the casts, were of absorbing interest. At once a memento of the heroic
period of American music and of his first manhood, the faded crudely
embellished strips of paper, bearing names, lyric tenors and sopranos of
limpid, bird-like song long ago lost in rosy and nebulous clouds of
fable and cherished affection, roused remembered pleasures sharper than
any calm actuality of to-day. He paused with a quiet exclamation, the
single glass adroitly held in his left, astigmatic, eye fastened on the
announcement of a famous evening, a famous name. His sense of the leaf
before him blurred in the vivid memory of Patti, singing Martha in the
campaign brought by Mapleson in the old Academy of Music against the
forces of the new Metropolitan Opera House. He had been one of a
conservative number that had supported the established opera, declaring
heatedly that the Diva and Mapleson were an unapproachable musical
combination, before which the shoddier magnificence of its rival,
erected practically in a few summer months, would speedily fade.

Nevertheless, he recalled, the widely heralded performance had been
coolly received. Patti, although she had not perceptibly failed in
voice, had been unable to inspire the customary enthusiasm; and the
scene at the evening's end, planned to express her overwhelming triumph
and superiority, when the horses had been taken from her carriage and it
had been dragged by hand to the portal of the Windsor Hotel, had been no
better than perfunctory. The wily Mapleson had arranged that beforehand,
Howat Penny realized, with a faint, reminiscent smile on his severe
lips--the "enthusiastic mob" had been coldly recruited, at a price, from
the choristers. Another memory of Patti, and of that same performance,
flooded back--the dinner given her in the Brunswick. He saw again the
room where, on a divan, she had received her hosts, the seventy or more
men of fashion grouped in irreproachable black and white, with her suave
manager, the inevitable tea rose in his lapel, on a knee before Adelina,
kissing her hand. The dinner had been laid in the ball room, lit with a
multitude of wax candles. The features, appearance, of the more
prominent men, of Mahun Stetson and Daly and William Steinway, were
clear still. The original plan had been to include ladies at the
dinner, but the latter, affecting outrage at the Diva's affair with the
Marquis de Caux, had refused to