It was in Wiesbaden. A young man—Adolf, Prince Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein was his name—sought our acquaintance. It appeared that he was favored by nature with a phenomenal tenor voice and was passionately devoted to singing. This naturally formed a basis of acquaintance, and later of attraction. He had once heard me as I was singing by an open window, and this had induced him to make my acquaintance. We asked him to call and bring his music. He willingly acceded to this request. I was astonished that the pieces which he brought were not only songs, but also and for the most part opera airs, and he was no less astonished to find that I too had a supply of scores. The first thing that he sang for us was the aria from _Faust_,—“O dimora casta e pura.” I accompanied him on the piano. When he had finished the aria—he had sung it wonderfully—I opened my score of _Faust_ and began to sing the soprano part of the duet; he immediately joined in, and we sang the duet through like two regular opera artists. “Have you been preparing for the stage, Countess?” he asked in amazement. “I might ask you the same question, Prince.” The question remained this first time unanswered. We had each found such pleasure in this assured and accurate part-singing that we arranged to have music together assiduously. He now came to our house every day, and the duet from _Faust_ was followed by the duet from _Roméo et Juliette_ and then by the duet between Raoul and Valentine. Soon the young man confided to us that he had indeed the intention of devoting himself to the art. Within a month he proposed to start for America, and there, under an assumed name, to appear in concerts or perhaps on the stage. It had been a difficult matter to extort permission from his parents, but his passion for singing was so overmastering that he would have been willing to renounce everything in order to make his beloved art his profession. He also had hopes of winning great pecuniary rewards. Being a younger brother of the heir of entail, he had no expectation of inheriting wealth, while in America first-class tenors always reaped an abundant harvest of dollars. Thereupon I told him also what plans I had cherished, and that they had been wrecked merely on account of my insuperable nervousness, which crippled me whenever I was about to sing before a numerous company or at a decisive test. He had experienced the same thing, but had in the course of time succeeded in getting the better of it. And so we understood each other perfectly. Our voices blended splendidly, and the end was—does not every one suspect what the end was? For a fortnight, for hours every day, to declare to each other in major and minor, in tender and passionate tones, _Io t’amo—Je t’adore—will sterben—gern ... für dich_—“will gladly die—for thee”—cannot be done with impunity, especially if the two are sympathetic. And so it came to pass that we agreed to unite our fortunes, which were so similar.