“I do not know how to thank you enough for your charming gift. I am afraid, however, that the use of your lozenges will not make me your rival. _Voce quastata di ottante’ anni non si ricupera._ “It was a rare treat to hear from your Italian lips last night the songs of my own tongue, rendered with a delicacy of modulation and a fineness of utterance such as no native ever in my hearing has reached or even approached. Believe me, “Faithfully yours, “W. E. GLADSTONE.” [Illustration: MADAME PATTI AT EIGHTEEN.] This letter very naturally gave our conversation a reminiscent turn, and, after some talk of great folk she has known, I asked Madame Patti what had been the proudest experience in her career. “For a great and unexpected honor most gracefully tendered, nothing that has touched me deeper than a compliment paid by the Prince of Wales and a distinguished company, at a dinner given in honor of the Duke of York and the Princess May, a little while before their wedding. The dinner was given by Mr. Alfred Rothschild, one of my oldest and best friends. There were many royalties present, and more dukes and duchesses than I can easily remember. During the ceremonies the Prince of Wales arose, and to my great astonishment, proposed the health of his ‘old and valued friend Madame Patti.’ He made _such_ a pretty speech, and in the course of it said that he had first seen and heard me in Philadelphia in 1860, when I sang in ‘Martha,’ and that since then his own attendance at what he was good enough to call my ‘victories in the realm of song’ had been among his most pleasant recollections. He recalled the fact that on one of the occasions when the princess and himself had invited me to Marlborough House, his wife had held up little Prince George, in whose honor we were this night assembled, and bade him kiss me, so that in after life he might say that he had ‘kissed the famous Madame Patti.’ And then, do you know, that whole company of royalty, nobility, and men of genius rose and cheered me and drank my health. Don’t you think that any little woman would be proud, and ought to be proud, of a spontaneous tribute like that?”