Our young prima donna stepped upon the stage (as our visit was in the daytime) and sang to us; she had sung there before to an audience of five thousand, but I think she took just as much pains for us, and I am sure we were not less enthusiastic. I expect some day to hear her sing when she is _famous_, but it will never afford me greater pleasure than when she sang to her audience of five in the great “Scala” of Milan. One little incident, happening not long before, was so pretty that I am tempted to tell it you. “Katrina” (who is of German parents, but born and always lived in New York) had only been led before the public once,--i.e., last winter she was the “leading lady” of the first opera in Turin,--and on the evening of the close of the engagement she was “called out” to sing a little national air, in which she had been exceedingly popular. When she stepped before the curtain she found the entire house a _blaze of light_, which at first nearly “upset” her, but, gathering up, she went through her air, to the last strain, when four men entered and placed at her feet an enormous bouquet of the choicest flowers, nearly four feet across. She managed to accept it, but attached to it was a note which requested her, when it should be faded, before throwing it away to open it with care, and at the end of a week this was done, and hidden among the flowers were found a magnificent gold watch and chain, pins, necklaces of coral, turquoises and pearls, bracelets and rings, which I could not enumerate. It had been ordered and arranged in Geneva, and sent all the way through the mountain passes to her. I thought this was a pretty success for the début of a little American girl, studying in a strange land with little money. As a child she used to sing in New York with Patti. But you must be tired of Milan, and wish I would hasten on if I am going. Well, I will, and so imagine this to be Saturday the 6th of April, 9 o’clock A.M., and I just taking the train eastward. The day was so lovely, so full of the springtime, the grass and grain so green, the swinging vines swaying over all the fields, the birds literally bursting their little throats, the fields filled with peasants in gay dress working to merry tunes, and when you could draw the eyes away from these near scenes they fell to the northward, first upon a line of dim, hazy blue, but over this, skirting the horizon again, the whole chain, peak after peak, of ranging Alps, such an unbroken line of glittering snow--here on the south only four miles away the field of Solferino where France lost one thousand officers in a day.