"Boris Goudonow," as it used to be given at the Metropolitan, is a good example of what real artist vision can do with colour. Those who saw those figures in brilliant green, kneeling with their backs to the audience, barring off the procession scene, while the towering minaret of the cathedral carried the eye up and up at the back, will surely never forget the light and shade grouping. It has since, I am sorry to say, lost some of its skilful arrangement, which I suppose is unavoidable, but the performance is still homogeneous and a unit, as to _décors,_ score and costumes. It was on the Kaiser's birthday that we saw "Corfu," and afterwards we went to the newly-opened Hotel Esplanade for supper. I have never seen such a sight. All imaginable uniforms were there, on all types of officers and foreign diplomats. Some looked magnificently romantic, and some as if they had stepped from the comic opera stage. The women, as usual in Germany, though plentifully be-jewelled, looked dull and inadequate beside the men. One summer night in Berlin, we went to Max Reinhardt's small theatre, the Kammerspiel, to see "Fruehlingserwachen." My dear friend, Oscar Saenger, was in town, and I had happened to see him in a box at the opera the evening before. He had come to see Berger, the giant baritone whom he had transformed into a tenor, in his first performance of _Siegmund_. I think Putnam Griswold, that splendid type of the best American singer, sang the _Wanderer_ that night. Saenger asked us to go to the theatre with him, as we had not met in years, and by chance we chose "Fruehlingserwachen" of Wedekind. Never shall I forget that evening. The quiet, dark wooden walls of the theatre, and the comfortable box they showed us into, in which we sat, seeing but unseen in the obscurity; the lack of applause when the curtain fell, and then--the performance. German actors lead the world, in my opinion, and the intensity of those players, the skill with which they played those most unhappy children, the tremulous, inadequate mother, that dark scene with its girl-women shriek, left us breathless and dazed. The highest possible tribute I pay to German actors, and to some of those gathered together that winter in that theatre. Such a _Falstaff_ I never saw as we saw there in "Henry V," nor such marvellous presentations of Shakespeare. Moissy as _Prince Hal_ in his father's deathbed scene; the _Doll Tearsheet_; the collection of hangers-on in the Inn Scene, the understanding of the spirit of Shakespeare--all these were priceless joys. Shakespeare does not spell bankruptcy in Germany, and the people really love it, and perhaps there is a reason why.