It was this mention of Jenny Lind’s charities, used casually but pointedly in every publicity notice Barnum wrote that turned his speculation into a certain success. It is proof of his sagacity as a showman that he utilized all sides of his materials, and even exploited as effectively as he did their main claims to fame, any incidental personal characteristics they might reveal. He not only exploited them thoroughly, but he also foresaw the possibilities of them, at least in the case of Jenny Lind. A few years later Barnum looked back upon his accomplishment and confessed: “I may as well state,” he wrote in his autobiography, “that although I relied prominently upon Jenny Lind’s reputation as a great musical _artiste_, I also took largely into my estimate of her success with all classes of the American public, her character for extraordinary benevolence and generosity. Without this peculiarity in her disposition, I never would have dared make the engagement which I did, as I felt sure that there were multitudes of individuals in America who would be prompted to attend her concerts by this feeling alone.” Previously divas had sung for charity, and there are those who do so unobtrusively every day, yet never before or since have we heard of an artist’s benevolence in the same breath as we heard of her talents; but Jenny Lind during the entire period of her fame in America was known and discussed more as a Florence Nightingale than as The Swedish Nightingale. Barnum, as he himself expressed it, “had put innumerable means and appliances into operation for the furtherance of my object, and little did the public see of the hand that indirectly pulled at their heart-strings, preparatory to a relaxation of their purse-strings; and these means and appliances were continued and enlarged throughout the whole of that triumphal musical campaign.” It was not necessary for Barnum to work very hard with the New York newspapers; they could be depended upon to realize that Jenny Lind was a story, and in the days when James Gordon Bennett, the elder, was hurling almost daily competitive epithets at Horace Greeley, a story was sought after with even greater zeal than to-day, when cables, wireless telegraphy and airplanes make so many of them. In 1850 the New York newspapers gave much space to the news from Europe, and Jenny Lind was creating a European sensation. The English and Continental newspapers were received by the New York newspapers on the fastest steamers, and long extracts from them took the place of local stories. Although the conductor of the Philadelphia train may have ignored it, the Jenny Lind mania in Europe did not escape the eye of the metropolitan editor. Extracts of European criticisms, accounts of her personal and artistic triumphs, comments on her benevolence, appear regularly in the newspapers of the period, so she was not exactly unknown to those in America who read the European news.