My wife and I became very fond of him and, later on, when he and I joined the Metropolitan Opera House Company, again under Maurice Grau, we would often take our meals together on the long Western trips to and from California. He was exceedingly irascible if servants did not carry out his orders properly, and he would berate them in his very resonant voice with a distinctness of utterance worthy of the _Comédie Française_. One morning we were seated at breakfast in the dining-car of our train when the colored waiter brought him his coffee, which was so weak that a drop of the so-called cream turned it a bluish gray. “Take away that coffee!” Bispham thundered. “It is not fit to drink. It is too weak!” “Oh, no, sah!” expostulated gently the waiter. “Dat coffee am all right. It’s de cream what’s too powerful strong!” At that time leather suitcases were just making their first appearance and I had bought one and carried it about with me. Bispham noticed it and said, in his extreme Kensington English, which he had carefully acquired over there: “Walter, that is a very nice bag you have there. I think I will buy four of them, each one a little smaller than the other, so that I can put them all inside each other.” “Why,” I said, “David, aren’t you going to pack anything else inside of those bags?” “Ha, ha, ha!” laughed David. “Walter, you are always having your little joke!” Whenever my opera company came to Boston the supers, when an extra group or crowd of knights or peasants, etc., were necessary, were always taken from Harvard University. This became a source of enormous revenue to the doorkeeper at the stage entrance. Our stage-manager paid him twenty-five cents for each super, but he not only pocketed this money himself but charged the students anywhere from fifty cents upward, according to the popularity of the opera, for the privilege of hearing it from the stage. In consequence we often had the most wonderful athletic specimens that the ardent pursuit of sport produces among college men, delighting our eyes as the curtain rose, and the knights and nobles in the second act of “Tannhäuser,” for instance, clad in magnificent robes, would march in and solemnly listen to the contest of song in the castle of the Landgrave of Thuringia. But they were not all athletes, and I remember one real student among them. The curtain went up on the first act of “Lohengrin” and, to my amazement as I looked up from my conductor’s stand, I saw one of these college boys, dressed in the armor and cloak of one of King Henry’s knights, calmly standing at the foot of the throne, large spectacles on his nose, busily following the action of the opera from a libretto which he held in his hand and close to his eyes.