Je vous soumets ces réflexions en vous laissant d'ailleurs la faculté de faire usage de mon nom si vous le croyez utile aux interests de votre enfant. J'ai l'honneur d'être, Monsieur, Votre trés humble Serviteur, M. GARCIA. At last her teacher thought her ready to make the trial. An engagement was secured under the management of Alfred Bunn, and on January 23, 1852, Kate Crichton made her _début_ on the opening night of the Drury Lane season in "Robert le Diable." As to her success we may quote 'The Times':-- "As Princess Isabelle, Miss Crichton (in whose person we recognised Miss Browne, the most promising pupil of the vocal art in the Royal Academy of Music) made her first appearance on any stage. She was successful to a degree which, since the _début_ of Mr Sims Reeves in 1849, has had no parallel on the English stage." Unhappily Miss Crichton's career, so brightly begun, was brought to a sudden close by her catching a malignant fever at Milan, resulting in the loss of her vocal powers. Had it not been for this, there is no doubt that she, too, would have been among that wonderful band of pupils who won fame in the operatic world for their maestro and themselves. Miss Crichton, however, during her years of study seems to have caught the bacillus of old age from her master, for, upon ultimately regaining the beauty of her voice after many years of retirement, she continued to sing to her friends until within a few months of her death in her eightieth year. Among other eminent pupils who acquired from Garcia the bad habit of longevity, one may recall Stockhausen, who lived to pass his eightieth birthday; Charles Santley and Bessie Palmer, who are well on in the seventies; and Pauline Viardot, who is not so very far off her ninetieth year. Who will assert that old age is not catching? 1850 was a year interesting to musicians from the fact that Frederick Gye, the new manager of Covent Garden, produced Halévy's opera, "La Juive," while the great German basso, Herr Formes, made his English _début_; but the year was memorable for England at large, from the fact that it saw the death of two of her best-known men--Robert Peel and Wordsworth. With the following year--in which Turner passed away--the subject of this memoir was included for the first time in the census of the United Kingdom. It affords a curious comparison with the numbers of the present day, when we note that the Return, taken a month before the opening of the Great Exhibition, gave the population as 27,637,761, the last figure of which shows the advent of the maestro with unmistakable clearness.