I was not popular with my fellow-artists and did not have a very pleasant time preparing and rehearsing for my first parts. The chorus was made up of Italians who never studied their music, merely learned it at rehearsal, and the rehearsals themselves were often farcical. The Italians of the chorus were always bitter against me for, up to that time, Italians had had the monopoly of music. It was not generally conceded that Americans could appreciate, much less interpret opera; and I, as the first American _prima donna_, was in the position of a foreigner in my own country. The chorus, indeed, could sometimes hardly contain themselves. "Who is she," they would demand indignantly, "to come and take the bread out of our mouths?" One other person in the company who never gave me a kind word (although she was not an Italian) was Adelaide Phillips, the contralto. She was a fine artist and had been singing for many years, so, perhaps, it galled her to have to "support" a younger countrywoman. When it came to dividing the honours she was not at all pleased. As Maddalena in _Rigoletto_ she was very plain; but when she did Pierotto, the boyish, rustic lover in _Linda_, she looked well. She had the most perfectly formed pair of legs--ankles, feet and all--that I ever saw on a woman. In singing with Brignoli there developed a difficulty to which Ferri's blindness was nothing. Brignoli seriously objected to being touched during his scene! Imagine playing love scenes with a tenor who did not want to be touched, no matter what might be the emotional exigencies of the moment or situation. The bass part in _Linda_ is that of the Baron, and when I first sang the opera it was taken by Susini, who had been with us on our preparatory _tournée_. His wife was Isabella Hinckley, a good and sweet woman, also a singer with an excellent soprano voice. I found that the big basso (he was a very large man with a buoyant sense of humour) was a fine actor and had a genuine dramatic gift in singing. His sense of humour was always bubbling up, in and out of performances. I once lost a diamond from one of my rings during the first act. My dressing-room and the stage were searched, but with no result. We went on for the last act and, in the scene when I was supposed to be unconscious, Susini caught sight of the stone glittering on the floor and picked it up. As he needed his hands for gesticulations, he popped the diamond into his mouth and when I "came to" he stuck out his tongue at me with the stone on the end of it!