school. I communicated to her the discouraging news that I
could never hope to trill. "Nonsense, my dear," she said, "someone told
me that too, but I determined that I was going to learn. I did not know
how to go about it exactly, but I knew that with the proper patience and
will-power I would succeed. Therefore I worked up to three o'clock one
morning, and before I went to bed I was able to trill."

I decided to take Mme. Oestberg's advice, and I practiced for several
days until I knew that I could trill, and then I went back to my teacher
and showed him what I could do. He had to admit it was a good trill,
and he couldn't understand how I had so successfully disproved his
theories by accomplishing it. It was then that I learned that the singer
can do almost anything within the limits of the voice, if one will only
work hard enough. Work is the great producer, and there is no substitute
for it. Do not think that I am ungrateful to my teacher. He gave me a
splendid musical drilling in all the standard solfeggios, in which he
was most precise; and in later years I said to him, "I am not grateful
to you for making my voice, but because you did not spoil it."

After having sung a great deal and thought introspectively a great deal
about the voice, one naturally begins to form a kind of philosophy
regarding it. Of course, breathing exercises are the basis of all good
singing methods, but it seems to me that singing teachers ask many of
their pupils to do many queer impractical things in breathing, things
that "don't work" when the singer is obliged to stand up before a big
audience and make everyone hear without straining.

If I were to teach a young girl right at this moment I would simply ask
her to take a deep breath and note the expansion at the waist just above
the diaphragm. Then I would ask her to say as many words as possible
upon that breath, at the same time having the muscles adjacent to the
diaphragm to support the breath; that is, to sustain it and not collapse
or try to push it up. The trick is to get the most tone, not with the
most breath but with the least breath, and especially the very least
possible strain at the throat, which must be kept in a floating,
gossamer-like condition all the time. I see girls, who have been to
expensive teachers, doing all sorts of wonderful calisthenics with the
diaphragm, things that God certainly did not intend us to do in learning
to speak and to sing.

Any attempt to