At a charming reception given at the house of Albert’s father after the concert, I met the historian Ferrero and a delightful acquaintance from previous visits, Mrs. Janet Ross. She is a daughter of the beautiful Lady Duff-Gordon, and when she was a child George Meredith had occupied a cottage on her father’s estate in England. He had adored her and it was said that she had been his inspiration for _Rose_ in “Evan Harrington.” I had met her in Florence in 1913, when she already was well over seventy and a woman of remarkable intellectual power and physical activity. She lives in a delightful old villa with walls two feet thick on a hill below Fiesole. Boccaccio had written part of his “Decameron” there and the house was filled with interesting old Italian furniture. She made her own olive-oil and vermuth on her farm and sold large quantities of it to England. When I admired some exquisite dining-room chairs, she told me she had found them in Pisa and that they were good eighteenth-century models. She said: “I have a little Italian carpenter who carves wood very well and if you like I can have these copied for you and they will cost you very little.” I have these chairs in my house to-day and value them doubly as having come to me through the good offices of this interesting lady. She had also made a remarkable collection of old Italian _stornelli_, which she had heard through mingling with the Italian peasants and farmers in Tuscany and elsewhere and had noted down. As this collection numbers literally hundreds of folk-songs, many of them dating back centuries, it should prove valuable to the connoisseur. In Parma, the following day, I visited the Teatro Farnese. It is the oldest theatre in Italy, and while it is in a somewhat dilapidated condition and, of course, no longer used for performances, it is fascinating as a relic, and one can well imagine what splendid pageants and dramatic cantatas must have been performed there before the great nobles of that day and their retinue. The Teatro Regio seemed to me the most beautiful that we had played in. It seated over two thousand people and we marvelled that so small a town as Parma should be the proud possessor of such a home for music.