We had organized our life thus: mother spent the forenoon at her work, I stayed at home meanwhile (for it was settled as a fundamental principle that I was not to enter the gambling-rooms), and during this time I occupied myself with my piano and with my books. We had immediately rented a piano and subscribed for six volumes at a time from the circulating library, which was in the house next door. I was always a ravenous devourer of books: without three volumes of belles-lettres (novels in several volumes were the style then), two of Tauchnitz, and one of German science, I was not to be contented. In all time to which my thoughts go back, I have always, under all circumstances and in every situation, led two lives—my own and that of my reading. I mean, the events that I lived through and those that came to me through description have simultaneously enriched my store of memories; to the persons known to me in daily intercourse there have been added the heroes of my authors; it is under the influence of a double experience that what I am has taken shape. The stories of the “Thousand and One Nights” belong to my impressions of the Orient just as much as does my real stay in the Caucasus, and many a living gallant has quickened my pulse less acutely than has the imagined figure of Marquis Posa. And does not one often feel it as one of the experiences of life when from the words of a thinker or scientist a new truth breaks forth, when suddenly a fold of the veil that wraps the great mystery “Universe” is lifted? —Well, then, I devoted the forenoon to my occupation at home. At one o’clock my mother came from her work (oh, how laborious and really hateful she said it was!) and we lunched in our room. In the afternoon we dressed nicely for the concert; at seven o’clock came dinner at the Kurhaus restaurant, mostly in company, and after it, three times a week, opera. Just then Adelina Patti, still quite young but already renowned, was singing there _als Gast_. She was receiving an honorarium of five thousand francs for every performance. I heard her in _La Sonnambula_, _Faust_, _Lucia di Lammermoor_, _Don Pasquale_, _La Traviata_, _Linda di Chamouni_, _Crispino e la Comare_. It must surely be a divine sensation to stand there on the boards, the incarnation of an ideal figure, and with the magic of one’s art to take so many hearts captive, to acquire so much glory, honor, wealth, and withal to intoxicate one’s self with the sweetness of one’s own voice,—these thoughts, joined with a certain feeling of envy, ran through my mind while Patti sang, and now I understood why my mother had felt it such an impairment of her happiness in life that she had been hindered from becoming a Malibran. Malibran, it was affirmed, had been a hundred times greater than Patti; and her voice (my mother’s) had, she said, been put on a level with Malibran’s by connoisseurs. Might not I, perhaps, have inherited this divine gift?