, Margaret, and my wife. Morgan said
that the glasses were raised to us from the parquet and leveled at us
from the loges because we were a country party, but he well enough knew
whose fresh beauty and enthusiastic young face it was that drew the fire
when the curtain fell on the first act, and there was for a moment a
little lull in the hum of conversation.

"I had heard," Morgan was saying, "that the opera was not acclimated in
New York; but it is nearly so. The audience do not jabber so loud nor so
incessantly as at San Carlo, and they do not hum the airs with the
singers--"

"Perhaps," said my wife, "that is because they do not know the airs."

"But they are getting on in cultivation, and learning how to assert the
social side of the opera, which is not to be seriously interfered with by
the music on the stage."

"But the music, the scenery, were never before so good," I replied to
these cynical observations.

"That is true. And the social side has risen with it. Do you know what an
impudent thing the managers did the other night in protesting against the
raising of the lights by which the house was made brilliant and the cheap
illusions of the stage were destroyed? They wanted to make the house
positively gloomy for the sake of a little artificial moonlight on the
painted towers and the canvas lakes."

As the world goes, the scene was brilliant, of course with republican
simplicity. The imagination was helped by no titled names any more than
the eye was by the insignia of rank, but there was a certain glow of
feeling, as the glass swept the circle, to know that there were ten
millions in this box, and twenty in the next, and fifty in the next,
attested well enough by the flash of jewels and the splendor of attire,
and one might indulge a genuine pride in the prosperity of the republic.
As for beauty, the world, surely, in this later time, had flowered here
--flowered with something of Aspasia's grace and something of the haughty
coldness of Agrippina. And yet it was American. Here and there in the
boxes was a thoroughbred portrait by Copley--the long shapely neck, the
sloping shoulders, the drooping eyelids, even to the gown in which the
great-grandmother danced with the French officers.

"Who is that lovely creature?" asked Margaret, indicating a box opposite.

I did not know. There were two ladies, and behind them I had no
difficulty in making out Henderson and--Margaret evidently had not seen
him Mr. Ly