So he had to make his first appearance upon that "unworthy scaffold," before an audience which, multifold as his experience had been, was one such as he had never sung to yet. As the shadows of evening began to fall, rough torches of pine wood were lighted and shed a glare such as Salvator Rosa loved to kindle, upon a scene such as he delighted to paint. The rascals had taste,--that the tenor himself could not deny. They knew the choice bits of the operas which held the stage forty years ago, and they called for them wisely and applauded his efforts vociferously. Nay, more, in the height of their enthusiasm, they would toss him one of his own doubloons or dollars, instead of the bouquets usually hurled at well-deserving singers. They well judged that these flowers that never fade would be the tribute he would value most, and so they rewarded his meritorious strains out of his own stores, as Claude Du Val or Richard Tarpin, in the golden days of highway robbery, would sometimes generously return a guinea to a traveller he had just lightened of his purse, to enable him to continue his journey. It was lucky for the unfortunate G---- that their approbation took this solid shape, or he would have been badly off indeed; for it was all he had to begin the world with over again. After his appreciating audience had exhausted their musical repertory and had as many encores as they thought good, they broke up the concert and betook themselves to their fastnesses among the mountains, leaving their patient to find his way to the coast as best he might, with a pocket as light as his soul was heavy. At Vera Cruz a concert or two furnished him with the means of embarking himself and his troupe for Europe, and leaving the New World forever behind him. And here I must leave him, for my story is done. The reader hungering for a moral may discern, that, though Signor G---- received the price he asked for his lovely daughter, it advantaged him nothing, and that he not only lost it all, but it was the occasion of his losing everything else he had. This is very well as far as it goes; but then it is equally true that M. M. ---- actually obtained his wife, and that Mynheer Van Holland paid for her. I dare say all this can be reconciled with the eternal fitness of things; but I protest I don't see how it is to be done. It is "all a muddle," in my mind. I cannot even affirm that the banditti were ever hanged; and I am quite sure that the unlucky Dutch merchant, whose goods were so comically mixed up with this whole history, never had any poetical or material justice for his loss of them. But it is as much the reader's business as mine to settle these casuistries. I only undertook to tell him who it was that paid for the _Prima Donna_,-- and I have done it. V. "I consider that a good story," said the Consul, when he had finished the narration out of which I have compounded the foregoing,-- "and, what is not always the case with a good story, it is a true one."