These three were the only ones that season whom we cared about, though we were friendly enough with all of them after Christmas, and as I have said, we dined at the hotel with a group of them every day. They were all types in their way. First the director--a survival of the old school, with rather long dyed hair and enormous dyed moustache, always in _Gehrock_ (frock coat) with a large tie in which reposed a royal monogram in pearls and diamonds presented to him by the Hereditary Grand Duke of Glumphenbergen-Schlimmerheim or something, during his career as _Heldenbariton_. In the street he wore a soft black felt hat which would have done for the _Wanderer_ in "Siegfried," and of course a fur-lined coat whenever the weather gave the least excuse for one. Champagne was his universal panacea--his very present help in trouble. If he had a disagreement with a singer for any cause and wished to make it right again, he would always send a bottle of _Sekt_ if it were a woman, or present the money to buy one if it were a man. He had been a famous singer in his day, and known others far more so, and his reminiscences could be interesting enough. His stories of Bayreuth under the old régime, were really interesting, with the prescribed position of every finger, every gesture studied to an inch, every tone closed, opened, coloured according to strictest rule, every syllable enunciated with minutest care, and the effect of all this schooling on the singer--the strained and broken nerves, the wrecked voices that were the result of it. Diction--_Aussprache_--was naturally enough his hobby, but his ideas were absurdly exaggerated and caused much more or less hidden amusement among the _Personal_. He insisted, for example, upon so much "t" in a phrase like Mignon's "_Dahin, dahin, moecht ich mit dir_," that it sounded like "_Moecht tich mit tier_." Anything of that sort among colleagues is looked upon as a tremendous joke, especially when it is on the director. One result of his former glory was that famous people came to this theatre to _gastieren_ and it also seemed to us as if every former singer or actor in Germany of any pretension to fame, who had a son or daughter to launch in either profession, sent them to our director for a début. This was looked upon by us as a bore; but the famous guests were rather amusing, because when they had gone, the director used to relate all kinds of derogatory stories about them. Possart---- Ritter, Ernst von---- was perhaps the most renowned. He came to recite Manfred at a special performance with our soloists and chorus. The director told us how, during the most impassioned speeches of Goethe or Shakespeare his eye would be on the upper gallery, counting empty places, and how after the performance when the box office sheet showed an _ausverkauftes Haus_ he would demand, "What about those three empty seats in the second row of the top gallery, at the left?"