When we finally arrived in New York, where we expected to give two Wagner concerts, lo and behold, the clouds suddenly lifted. Nordica was her old self, and while the diamond tiara could not have looked more regal nor the smile have been more ingratiating than at Worcester, Massachusetts, her voice had again regained its old charm and the cry of the Valkyrie and _Isolde’s_ Liebestod brought back to the memory of her audiences the happy days when Nordica, Schumann-Heink, and Jean de Reszke had electrified them at the Metropolitan. Madame Nordica was, however, not the only American artist with whom I came into frequent professional contact and who had achieved an eminence equal to that of the best of Europe. David Bispham became a member of my opera company in 1896. He came of an old Quaker family in Philadelphia, into whose lives music had never penetrated. How Bispham got his intense musical temperament is one of those mysteries that the laws of neither heredity nor environment can explain. He was a man of some means, and finding the local atmosphere in which he lived uncongenial to his evident artistic needs, he went to Europe. He had a vibrant barytone voice, studied singing with Lamperti, and gradually began to make successful appearances on the stage, especially in England. In my company he achieved especial successes as _Telramund_, _Kurvenal_, and _Beckmesser_, also as _Roger Chillingworth_ in my own opera on Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter.” He adored a part in which he could “act.” In fact, he sometimes overacted. His musical memory, especially in his later years, was not always to be relied on, but the more he forgot the words the more intense his acting became, and as _Chillingworth_, in which rôle he really never quite learned the text, he fairly contorted his body in giving expression to the sinister machinations and revengeful desires of that demon. As a man he was of a singularly delightful, almost childlike disposition. The things of this life rarely existed for him as they really were. He saw them through the glass of his own exuberant imagination. The mysterious, the extraordinary, always fascinated him, and he therefore often became the prey of designing people who took easy advantage of his trusting nature. He was a most generous colleague and more free from jealousy than most operatic singers. Rehearsals, no matter how long, were to him as the breath to his nostrils, and he would often spend hours before his glass in the dressing-room making up his face for some character part in close imitation of a famous picture he had seen at the Uffizi in Florence or the Royal Gallery in London. He loved to enact a villain, but, on the other hand, his doglike devotion to _Tristan_ as _Kurvenal_ often brought tears to our eyes.