"One 'hall' we came to, there was no dressing-room, so we strung a sheet in one corner, and some one put a table behind with a lamp on it. The 'ladies of the company' (myself and the contralto) occupied this improvised dressing-room. Suddenly we discovered that we were unconsciously treating the audience to a shadow pantomime performance. There was only one way out of the difficulty,--we women must shield each other. So I held my skirts out while the contralto dressed, and she did the same for me. "I remember in one place we had managed to excite the hayseeds into coming to hear us, and the hall was quite full. We were giving a little operetta. Somehow or other it didn't seem to please the public, and they were in a mood to be disagreeable,--yes, restless. They wanted their money's worth; they were mean enough to say so. "We held a consultation behind our sheetings, and the tenor suddenly remembered that once upon a time, when he was a school-boy, he used to amuse his comrades with tricks. 'Could he do them now?' we asked. He would do his best, he said. So he got a wooden table, hammered a nail into it, bent it a little, and slipped a curtain ring on his finger. "The trick was to lift the table with the palm of the hand, the ring and nail being invisible. Just in the middle of the trick the nail broke. Well, I believe that audience was ready to mob us. The bass, seeing the situation, made a dive for the money in the front of the house, and we escaped. It was a packed house, too. There must have been as much as eight dollars." "Did you ever have to walk?" "Yes, indeed. We walked eight miles once to a town,--snowballed each other all the way. It was lots of fun. When we got there the local paper had an advance notice something like this: 'We are informed that "the Swedish Nightingale" and others intend to give a show in the schoolhouse to-night. Any one who pays money to go to their show will be sorry for it.' "The local manager, an Irishman, asked us to sing a little piece for him when we arrived. After we had done so, he said he had never heard anything so bad in all his life. As to the nightingale, he would give her three dollars to sing ballads, but the rest of the troupe were beneath contempt. His language was a dialect blue that was awful. I tell you it was hard luck singing in Missouri." In St. Joseph Miss Nielsen was fortunate enough to secure an engagement to sing in a condensed version of the opera "Penelope" at the Eden Musee. She received seventy-five dollars for her services, and this money paid the railroad fares of herself and some of the members of the defunct concert company to Denver, Colorado. There her singing attracted the attention of the manager of the Pike Opera Company, which she joined and accompanied to Oakland, California.