(Abbreviation for _Ich weiss ein Thema_, “I know a topic.”) If the proposed topic seemed good and interesting, then the word was “Puff,” and the transformation was accomplished. I remember that once, when we were playing in our corner of the room, Aunt Lotti, busy with embroidery at the other end, called out, “There, I don’t like your cough a bit, Elvira! So dry and so obstinate—we shall have to ask the doctor.” Now Elvira had at that time no cough whatever, but we had for several days been engaged in an extraordinarily touching game of puff, in which the lover was a consumptive doomed to death. I have spoken of my mother’s beautiful singing. This singing played a great and influential part in my childhood and later life. My mother always regarded it as a tragical missing of her vocation that she had not become an opera singer. In her early youth a famous Italian maestro had tested her voice and given her the assurance that no such soprano had been heard since Grisi, Pasta, and Malibran, and to this was to be added her dazzling presence; in short, the loftiest triumphs, the richest harvests of gold, would have lain open to the beautiful girl if she had adopted the theatrical career. Such was the opinion of the maestro, who also undertook to give her singing lessons after the old Italian method, and had, among other things, brought it to pass that she gave Norma’s entrance recitative with full-toned and tragic power, again putting to shame all the Grisis, Pastas, and Malibrans. But neither my grandparents nor “Aunt Claudius,” who had taken charge of my mother and brought her up, would hear a word of the theater, which in those days was still regarded as a sink of iniquity; and mamma’s Norma recitative never rang out on the boards, but very often thereafter in my nursery (where our piano stood), and imprinted itself on my soul as the ne plus ultra of womanly heroism and of operatic art. Druid priestess and mistletoe bough, passion, sublimity,—thus stood in my imagination the gleaming picture of Norma, enveloped in sweetest magic of melody, in unearthly potency of voice.