He was a mere mummy, this old man who had been celebrated as a teacher of singing in the days of Pasta and Malibran; a faint shadow of his former self, only kept alive by the mechanical exercise of his art. Yet, in spite of his great age, his ear was wonderfully keen and true; the sense of hearing, from continuous cultivation, being the only one which had survived the wreck of his faculties, and with the assistance of Bianca, he was still enabled to teach his wonderful system in an intelligible manner. Many of his pupils had been European, celebrities on the operatic stage during the past fifty years, and his rooms in Milan were crowded with souvenirs of famous artists of undying fame. His children, and, with the exception of Bianca, his grandchildren, were all dead; his friends and acquaintances and the generation that knew him had all passed away; but this Nestor of lyrical art still survived, alone and sad, amid the ruins of his past. White-haired, wrinkled, blear-eyed, silent, he sat daily in his great armchair, taking but little notice of the life around him, save to ask childish questions or talk about some dead-and-gone singer whose fame had once filled the world; but place a baton in his hand, strike the piano, lift the voice, and this apparent corpse awoke to life. He beat time, he corrected the least false note, he explained the necessary instructions in a faltering voice, and, during the lesson, bore at least some semblance of life; but when all was finished, the baton fell from his withered hand as he relapsed into his former apathy. One would have thought that he would have been glad to rest in his old age, but such was his love for his art that he insisted upon teaching still, and it was this alone which kept him alive. His granddaughter, Bianca, trained in the family traditions, was enabled to interpret his words, and, as his system of singing was unique, in spite of his apparent uselessness, he had many pupils. Bianca herself was a charming Italian girl of twenty, more like a graceful white lily in appearance than anything else, so fragile, so delicate, so pallid did she seem. Her mournful eyes, dark and soft as those of a gazelle, seemed too large for her pale, oval face; and her figure, small and slender, always put me in mind of that of a fairy. Indeed, in sport, I sometimes called her the Fairy of Midnight, after some poet-fancy that haunted my brain, for all her strength seemed to have gone into those glorious masses of raven-black hair, coiled so smoothly round her small head. This portraiture seems to give the idea that Bianca was a melancholy young person, yet such was not the case, for I have seen her as gay as a bird on bright days, or when she received a letter from her lover.