Nilsson is tall, graceful, slight, and very attractive, without being actually handsome. She acts well and naturally, and with intelligence, without exerting herself; she has the happy faculty of understanding and seizing things _au vol_, instead of studying them. She has a regal future before her. A second Jenny Lind! Their careers are rather similar. Jenny Lind was a singer in cafés, and Nilsson played the violin in cafés in Stockholm. She is clever, too! She has surrounded herself by a wall of propriety, in the shape of an English _dame de compagnie_, and never moves unless followed by her. This lady (Miss Richardson) is correctness and primness personified, and so _comme il faut_ that it is actually oppressive to be in the same room with her. Nilsson herself is full of fun and jokes, but at the same time dignified and serious. Christine Nilsson gave Mrs. Haggerty a box at the Théâtre Lyrique, where she is now playing "Traviata" (I think it was the director's box), and I was invited to go with her and Clem. The box was behind the curtain and very small and very dark. But it was intensely amusing to see how things were done, and how prosaic and matter-of-fact everything was. If ever I thanked my stars that I was not a star myself it was then. Everything looked so tawdry and claptrap: the dirty boards, the grossly painted scenery, the dingy workmen shuffling about grumbling and gruff, ordered and scolded by a vulgar superior. Of course the stars do not see all these things, because they only appear when the heavens are ready for them to shine in. The overture, so it sounded to us, was a clash of drums, trumpets, and trombones all jumbled together. After the three knocks of the director, which started up the dust of ages into our faces until we were almost suffocated, the curtain rose slowly with great noise and rumbling. The audience looked formidable as we saw it through the mist of cloudy gas-light, a sea of faces, of color and vagueness. The incongruity of costumes was a thing to weep over. If they had tried they could not have made it worse. The lady guests, walking and chatting, in a _soi-disant_ elegant salon, were dressed, some in Louis XV. splendor, some in dogesses' brocades, some in modern finery, with bows and ribbons and things looped up any way. Nilsson was dressed in quite modern style--flounces, laces, and fringes, and so forth, while Alfredo had donned a black velvet coat _à la_ something, with a huge jabot which fell over a frilled shirt-front. He wore short velvet trousers, and black-silk stockings covered his thin legs without the least attempt at padding. The "padre" was in a shooting-jacket, evidently just in from a riding- tour. He held a riding-stick, and wore riding-gantlets which he flourished about with such wide gesticulations that I thought he was going to hit Nilsson in the face.