When he left Thursday he did not look well, but I thought it was owing to the excitement and late hours and the irregular life we have been leading. He wanted to go to Cambridge, where he thought that he could take better care of himself. I would have gone with him, but I felt that I could not leave Strakosch and Worcester in the lurch. If I don't receive a reassuring telegram from you, I shall start off without delay. I was dreadfully nervous and unstrung, as you will see, when I tell you how I blundered. I do not like singing in oratorio. Getting up and sitting down all the time, holding and singing from a book, losing my place and having to find it in a hurry, is not what I like. However, I got on very well at first, but there is a place in the score where three angels come forward and sing a trio without accompaniment. Then the soprano (me) steps in front and sings, without a helping note: "Hail, Hail, O Lord God of Hosts!" The orchestra and chorus take up the same phrase after me. I sang boldly enough, "Hail, Hail, O Lord God of Hosts!" but suddenly felt cold shivers down my back when Zerrahn tapped his baton on his stand, thereby stopping all further proceedings, and turning to me said, in a low whisper, "A half-tone lower." Good gracious, how could I find the right note! First I had to remember the last tone I had sung, then I had to transpose it in my head, all in an instant. It was a critical moment. Suppose I did not hit the right note! The whole orchestra and the two- hundred-man-strong chorus would come thundering after me--the _orchestra on the right key_ and _the chorus following in my footsteps_. I turned cold and hot, and my knees trembled under me. You may imagine what a relief it was when I heard things going on as if nothing had happened. _I had struck the right note!_ And I finished the oratorio without further disaster. I do not think that any one in the audience remarked anything wrong. I said to Zerrahn, after: "Could you not have helped me? Could you not have given me the note?" "No," he answered. "Impossible! I could not ask the nearest violinist to play the note, and I could not trust myself to find it. I was as nervous as you were." [Mrs. Moulton was called to Cambridge the next day. Mr. Moulton had died suddenly.] CUBA, HAVANA, _January, 1873._ DEAR MAMA,--We left New York in a fearful blizzard. It was snowing, hailing, blowing, and sleeting; in fact, everything that the elements could do they did on that particular day. We were muffled up to our ears in sealskin coats, furs, boas, and so forth, and were piloted over the wet and slippery deck to our stateroom on the upper deck, which we wished had been on the under deck, as it was continually washed by the "wild waves." We knew pretty well "what the wild waves were saying"; at least Laura did, and they kept on saying it until well into the next day.