in her general haul my own special, unmistakable bouquet! I recognised it, saw her take it, but, as there was no card, had the greatest difficulty in getting it away from her. I did, though, in the end. Minnie Hauck was very pushing and took advantage of everything to forward and help herself. She never had the least apprehension about the outcome of anything in which she was engaged and, in this, she was extremely fortunate, for most persons cursed with the artistic temperament are too sensitive to feel confident. She was clever, too. This is another exception, for very few big singers are clever. I think it is Mme. Maeterlinck who has made use of the expression "too clever to sing well." I am convinced that there is quite a truth in it as well as a sarcasm. Wonderful voices usually are given to people who are, intrinsically, more or less nonentities. One cannot have everything in this world, and people with brains are not obliged to sing! But Minnie Hauck was a singer and she was also clever. If I remember rightly, she married some scientific foreign baron and lived afterwards in Lucerne. Once I heard of a soldier who was asked to describe Waterloo and who replied that his whole impression of the battle consisted of a mental picture of the kind of button that was on the coat of the man in front of him. It is so curiously true that one's view of important events is often a very small one,--especially when it comes to a matter of mere memory. Accordingly, I find my amethysts are almost my most vivid recollection in connection with _L'Étoile du Nord_. I wanted a set of really handsome stage jewelry for Catarina. In fact, I had been looking for such a set for some time. There are many _rôles_, Violetta for instance, for which rich jewels are needed. My friends were on the lookout for me, also, and it was while I was preparing for _The Star of the North_ that a man I knew came hurrying in with a wonderful tale of a set of imitation amethysts that he had discovered, and that were, he thought, precisely what I was looking for. "The man who has them," he told me, "bought them at a bankrupt sale for ninety-six dollars and they are a regular white elephant to him. Of course, they are suitable only for the stage; and he has been hunting for months for some actress who would buy them. You'd better take a look at them, anyhow."