All my friends except one urged me to go on with the work. The one exception was Andrew Carnegie who said, with that canny business acumen which made him one of the world’s richest men: “Walter, you have made a great success, artistically as well as financially; your profits have been enormous. But such a success rarely repeats itself immediately. You rightly divined the desire of the public for a return of Wagner opera, but this current has drawn into it many people who have come for curiosity only, and to whom Wagner is still a closed book. Many of these will not come back another time. Be contented to rest on your laurels.” Of course I would not listen to such good business advice and accordingly engaged a company of singers for the following year, who made a really remarkable ensemble. Among the newcomers was Madame Katherine Klafsky whose overwhelming impersonations of _Brunhilde_, _Isolde_, and especially of _Fidelio_, still vibrate in my memory. This last opera gave me such joy to conduct that, although it never drew within a thousand dollars as much as any of the other operas, I would insist on keeping it in the repertoire. This proves conclusively that the artist in me was much stronger than the impresario and that I really had no business to engage in the latter occupation. _Fidelio_ (_Leonore_), in the second act, liberates her husband from his shackles in the prison, and he says to her, “O, my Leonore, how much hast thou done for me!” She answers, “Nothing, nothing, my Florestan,” and the orchestra begins a soft murmur, upon which the two voices rise in an ecstatic duet of love. Klafsky gave this scene with such tenderness that the entire orchestra, as well as myself, were by this time almost choking with emotion, and it was all that I could do to lift my baton to give the signal for the beginning of the duet. Madame Ternina, another newcomer, was prevented by illness from appearing in Chicago, but in Boston she created a genuine sensation. The public divided itself into two factions, the one extolling the almost elemental dramatic vehemence of Klafsky, who fairly poured out her glorious voice, while the other proclaimed Ternina the greater artist because of her more intellectual conception and a certain noble artistic reticence. Part of the summer of 1894 I had spent in beginning the music of an opera on Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” The subject had always fascinated me and I had years before prepared a dramatic scenario for which I finally induced Hawthorne’s son-in-law, George Parsons Lathrop, to prepare a libretto. I completed the composition of the music the following summer and decided to produce it during the season 1895-96 with the Damrosch Opera Company in Boston, where the scene of the original novel is laid, in the old Colonial days of Governor Endicott. I gave the rôle of _Hester Prynne_ to Johanna Gadski. David Bispham played _Roger Chillingworth_, and Barron Berthold sang the clergyman, _Arthur Dimmesdale_.