"By Jove--if I could only--I'm going to try it anyway!" Then he shouted, "Don't move, please!" and took me just as I was. He was very doubtful as to the result for it was a new departure in photography; but the attempt was very successful, and other photographers began to try for the same natural and easy effect. Another time I happened to have a handkerchief in my lap that threw a white reflection on my face, and the photographer discovered from it the value of large light-coloured surfaces to deflect the light where it was needed. This, too, I consider, was an unconscious factor in the introduction of natural effects into photography. I never, however, took a satisfactory picture. People who depend on expression and animation for their looks never do. My likenesses never looked the way I really did--except, perhaps, one that a photographer once caught while I was talking about Duse, explaining how much more I admired her than I did Bernhardt. In those concert and oratorio years I remember very few pleasurable appearances: but unquestionably one of the few was on June 15th, when the Beethoven Jubilee was held and I was asked to sing as alternative _prima donna_ with Parepa Rosa. Although I had done well in the Crystal Palace, I was not a singer who was generally supposed nor expected to fill so large a place as the American Institute Colosseum on Third Avenue, and many people prophesied that I could not be satisfactorily heard there. I asked my friends to go to different parts of the house and to tell me if my voice sounded well. Even some of my friends out in front, though, did not expect to hear me to advantage. But, contrary to what we all feared, my voice proved to have a carrying quality that had never before been adequately recognised. The affair was a great success. Parepa Rosa did not, as a matter of fact, have quite so big a voice as she was usually credited with having. She had power only to _G_. Above the staff it was a mixed voice. She could diminish to an exquisite quality, but she could not reinforce with any particular volume or vibration. There was another occasion that I remember with a deep sense of its impressiveness:--that of the funeral of Horace Greeley, at which I sang. I knew Horace Greeley personally and recall many interesting things about him; but, naturally perhaps, what stands out in my memory is the fact that, a few days before he died, he came to hear me sing Handel's _Messiah_, being, as he said afterwards, particularly touched and impressed by my rendering of _I know that my Redeemer liveth_. When he came to die, the last words that he said were those, whispered faintly, as if they still echoed in his heart. It may have been because of this fact that it was I who was asked to sing at his funeral.