type that
has a heavy jaw and an aggressive eye, and strongly resembles the
portraits of Daniel Webster. Now Daniel Webster had a wide reputation
as a politician, but there is reason to believe that the numerous
persons who lent him money and never got it back thought him a
financier of undoubted ability, if not a comedian of talent. There
were giants in those days.

The English girl, breathing the clean air of the ocean, felt as if
something had left a bad taste in her mouth; and the famous young
singer, who had seen in two years what a normal Englishwoman would
neither see, nor guess at, nor wish to imagine in a lifetime, thought
she understood tolerably well what the bad taste meant. Moreover,
Margaret Donne was ashamed of what Margarita da Cordova knew, and
Cordova had moments of sharp regret when she thought of the girl who
had been herself, and had lived under good Mrs. Rushmore's protection,
like a flower in a glass house.

She remembered, too, how Lushington and Mrs. Rushmore had warned her
and entreated her not to become an opera-singer. She had taken her
future into her own hands and had soon found out what it meant to be
a celebrity on the stage; and she had seen only too clearly where
she was classed by the women who would have been her companions and
friends if she had kept out of the profession. She had learned by
experience, too, how little real consideration she could expect from
men of the world, and how very little she could really exact from such
people as Mr. Van Torp; still less could she expect to get it from
persons like Schreiermeyer, who looked upon the gifted men and women
he engaged to sing as so many head of cattle, to be driven more or
less hard according to their value, and to be turned out to starve the
moment they were broken-winded. That fate is sure to overtake the best
of them sooner or later. The career of a great opera-singer is rarely
more than half as long as that of a great tragedian, and even when a
primadonna or a tenor makes a fortune, the decline of their glory is
far more sudden and sad than that of actors generally is. Lady Macbeth
is as great a part as Juliet for an actress of genius, but there are
no 'old parts' for singers; the soprano dare not turn into a contralto
with advancing years, nor does the unapproachable Parsifal of
eight-and-twenty turn into an incomparable Amfortas at fifty. For the
actor, it often happens that the first sign of age is fatigue; in the
sin