He was anxious to see how this announcement would strike a member of the general public. While the cars were being changed at Princeton, Barnum told the conductor, who was an acquaintance, that he had just engaged Jenny Lind to visit this country. “Jenny Lind? Is she a dancer?” asked the conductor. The question chilled Barnum. He informed the conductor who and what Jenny Lind was, as his first step in educating the public, and he realized that he could not have too much time for the work before him. “Really, thought I,” he wrote in his autobiography, “if this is all that a man in the capacity of a railroad conductor between Philadelphia and New York knows of the greatest songstress in the world, I am not sure that six months will be too long a time for me to occupy in enlightening the entire public in regard to her merits.” Classical music has never had a circus appeal, but in order to come out of his contract with a profit, Barnum had to sell Jenny Lind as extensively as he sold the circus in later years. His instinct was sound when he quizzed the conductor on Jenny Lind, for it was to conductors and even to brakemen that Barnum had to appeal for financial support of his huge enterprise. II Though Jenny Lind was unfamiliar, even as a name, to the vast multitude in the United States, she was known throughout every country in Europe as The Swedish Nightingale, a name which was said to have been given her by Douglas Jerrold, a writer in _Punch_, who later gave the glass house of London the name of Crystal Palace. One would like to believe that this was the origin of that famous sobriquet, but, unfortunately, Jenny Lind had been called The Swedish Nightingale by her early admirers in her native country, Sweden. She was born in Stockholm, October 6, 1820, and was christened Johanna Maria Lind, but no one from her early childhood ever called her anything but that charming combination of sounds, with its implications of familiarity and Victorian virtue, Jenny Lind. Her father, Nicolas Jonas Lind, was a good-natured roisterer, twenty-two years old when Jenny was born. He was able to do little towards the support of his family by means of his position as bookkeeper. But he loved Bellman’s songs, and Bellman was the Swedish Burns, and he sang those songs with a good voice. All the practical management of the family affairs was left to Jenny’s mother, the influence of whose piety, austerity, and stubbornness on her daughter was undeniably great. At the period of Jenny’s birth her mother was keeping a day-school for girls. In her early years she was also influenced by her grandmother on her mother’s side, who implanted firm religious beliefs in the child. It was this grandmother who first discovered that Jenny Lind had musical talent. At the age of three Jenny reproduced on the square piano which her half-sister used for practising her scales a military fanfare she had heard.