Several years after, while touring in Holland, in a charming little place where we went to pass a free afternoon, we saw this same woman. She had found the strength to shake off her German master, had married a countryman and looked prosperous and happy. Neither Marjorie nor I ever received an offensive word or look from an officer. They used sometimes to send me postcards after a _Carmen_ or _Amneris_ night, closely scribbled over with signatures and greetings and phrases of admiration, all highly respectful. It always pleased me very much to receive these cards. The _Genossenschaft_ members of most theatres organize a _fête_ every year for the benefit of their society, and that spring we had a fancy dress ball. A lady is chosen at these balls by popular vote to be Rose Queen. I was chosen that time and had to parade around the room on the arm of a portly Major, who often sent me flowers and books of his own poems. I wore my _Carmen_ dress of black satin, with gold flowers, and my scarlet Spanish shawl. There was much cheap champagne drunk to the popular toast of "General Quenousamong." This was originally "_Que nous aimons_" (To those we love), and the "general" meant that every one was to join in. The French touch was considered elegant, just as _Couzank_ was the polite word for cousin, and _Satank_ for satin. Balls of this kind are highly popular and a great contrast to the usually simple lives of these small-town people. One form of simplicity I never adopted was the quite general one of eating their evening supper, consisting usually of a bit of sausage, and black bread and butter, out of bits of paper casually put down amongst the objects on the table in their bedrooms. When you had finished, you simply rolled up and threw away the greasy papers and the thing was over. Sometimes a meal may be captured free. One of our "comics" in Metz had to fish at the back of the stage in an operetta. He was always furnished with a salt herring by the property man, which he would suspend solemnly out of sight of the audience for a while, then slowly draw up, and proceed to eat. A clean picked spine was all that remained by the end of the act, and he had had his supper. Often the performances supplied me with welcome comic relief behind the scenes. I learned for instance, that the text of the Anvil chorus sung round me, as I lay on the canvas rock couch of _Azucena_, in "Trovatore," was: "_Ich habe Dir schon laengst gesagt, die Wurst sie schmeckt nach Seife_"--"I told you long ago, the sausage tastes of soap." Also the soldiers in "Faust" made their rollicking return from the wars to the words: "_He--ring und Apfel--Kartoffelnsalat._" "Herring and apple--potato salad." _Siegmund_ grows woefully vulgar, and the opening bars of his love song to his sister always say now to me: "_Winter Struempfe riechen im Monat Mai._"