The tenor lives in clover, chin deep, and never gets stung by the bees. Sometimes he forgets to wrap up his voice in the handkerchief when he goes out, or he sleeps in the direct line of a current of air, which comes in under the door, and the result is an indisposition. When he has an indisposition, he goes off hunting ducks at Calumet, instead of dears in the audience, and the manager forgives him and the audience pity him. He doesn't die like other singers, but gradually fades away like the rose, and disappears in a little cloud of perfume. The basso, on the other hand, is the personification of vocal misery, and he knows it. He feels that he is not interesting at all. He knows the women don't adore him, and he takes a fiendish delight in bellowing at them. He never has an opportunity to languish on the stage, or to go round kneeling and sighing and kissing of hands. He is never a lover. If a brigand, he is a dirty cut-throat. If a cavalier, he is some dilapidated old duke, with a young and pretty wife, just packing up preparatory to elopement with the tenor, and requesting him not to interfere with her little arrangements. If a sailor, he is a swaggering pirate. If an uncle, he is a miser. If a mayor, he is a simpleton. If a father, he is a fool. The composers never give him but one aria in an opera, and that is always written an octave higher than he can sing, or an octave lower than his boot heel. He is always in trouble with the orchestra. He knows he can squelch the first fiddles and reeds, and come out even with the bassoons and double basses, but the man with the trombone is his mortal enemy, and the man with the kettle-drums his skeleton. He feels in his heart of hearts that the one can blow him into ribbons, and the other pound him to a jelly, and what is more, he knows they are never happy, except when they are engaged in that pulverizing process. What little singing he has to do is devoted to panegyrics upon beer, dissertations upon cookery, and lugubrious screeds upon the infidelity of woman and his own ponderous wretchedness. When he is not confined to this, he is set up for a laughing stock in _buffo_ work. He has no runs and trills and sky-rockets with which to dazzle people. He knows that one of his long arias is like a long sermon. He usually has so much voice in his copper-lined and brass-riveted throat, that it invariably gets the better of him, either running like molasses in cold weather, or coming out by fits and starts, and leaking all round the edges. He must inevitably sing false, and it makes him unhappy. He is not at all delicate, being usually doubly blessed in chest and stomach, and the result is, he can't get sick if he tries. The blessed indisposition which so often gets into the velvet throat of the tenor, rarely gets into his, consequently his opportunities for duck-hunting at the Calumet are very limited. All of these afflictions make him misanthropical,