"It is a wonder, in the face of petty jealousies of this kind, coupled with the poverty of her mother, which seemed an insurmountable barrier to a musical education, that Alice's talents were not lost to the world. For every influence tending to push her forward, there seemed a dozen counter influences tending to pull her back. As a child, I have seen her many a time on the street, barefooted, clothing poor and scant, running errands for her mother. Later in life, when she was almost a young lady, I have known her to sing in public, gowned in the cheapest material, and she would appear time after time in the same dress. On such occasions she was often wan and haggard, as if from anxiety or overwork. But once in a while she received the praise which she so richly merited. "One day Father Lillis received a letter from a travelling man who was stopping at the Midland, in which he asked the name of the young woman who sang soprano in the choir. He had attended church the day before, he said, and had heard her sing. 'It is the most wonderful voice I ever heard,' he wrote. 'That girl is the coming Florence Nightingale.' I don't know whether the letter was ever answered or not, but Alice came to know of the incident, and it pleased her. "Both before and after she joined the choir, Alice appeared in amateur theatricals and in church concerts. She was always applauded and appreciated, but it was in the character of a soubrette in 'Chantaclara,' a light opera put on at the Coates Opera House by Professors Maderia and Merrihew, that she created the most decided sensation. This was but a few weeks before she left Kansas City." Miss Nielsen bade farewell to Kansas City in 1892, going away with an organization that styled itself the Chicago Concert Company, and which planned to tour the small towns of Kansas and Missouri. This, her earliest professional experience, ended in disaster, and Miss Nielsen was stranded in St. Joseph, Missouri, before she had been out a week. It was an eventful week, however, and Miss Nielsen vividly recalls it. "We got out somewhere in far Missouri," said Miss Nielsen, "with the thermometer out of sight and hotels heated with gas jets and red flannel. Nobody had ever heard of us. I don't think that in some of the towns we struck they'd ever heard anything newer than the 'Maiden's Prayer,' and that was as much as they wanted. They called me 'the Swedish Nightingale,' and you can imagine how I felt,--a nightingale in such a climate, and Swedish at that. But I just sang for all I was worth and I tried to educate them, too. I sang the 'Angel's Serenade,' and they didn't like it, because when they tried to whistle it in the audience, they couldn't. We didn't carry any scenery; we just had a lot of sheets with us, and used to drape the stage ourselves.