At Dresden there were honours enough and jealousies more. But Carl assailed them with new strength. And now, he took up an opera on a subject he had thought of but discarded, fortunately for himself and the world. He wrote Caroline that a friend of his was writing a libretto based on the old national legend, "Der Freischütz." Kind, the librettist, wrote night and day for ten days, and Carl, in great enthusiasm, forwarded the libretto for Caroline's opinion. She sent it back with violent criticisms, based upon her long stage experience and her intuition of stage effects. We can never thank her sufficiently for cutting out endless pages of songs and recitative by the melancholious old Hermit who, in the original version, was to commence the opera, and wander in and out of it incessantly. Caroline wrote, like Horace: "Away, with all these scenes.... Plunge at once into the popular element. Begin with the scene before the tavern." This seemed outrageous mutilation at first to the composer, and the librettist took it with still more violence; threatening for a time to withdraw his book completely. But often, thereafter, did Carl express his gratitude to her, whom he called his "Public with two eyes." Would to heaven, that there had been some Caroline Brandt to give similar advice to Wagner concerning his Wotan and his King Mark! Meanwhile, during the composition of "Der Freischütz," which was to mean so much for the happiness of Germany and the betterment of opera generally, Carl, the genius who struck out the magnificent work, was spending almost less time upon the details of composition and scoring than upon the purchase of articles for the home he was making for his bride-to-be. He wrote her long letters, describing his purchases of "chairs, crockery, curtains, knives, forks, spoons, pails, brooms, and mustard-pot." She had ceased to be in his mind the brilliant and fascinating soubrette, and had become in the silly lover's-Latin, his "pug, his duck, his bird." He answered a letter she wrote him describing her success in the "Magic Flute:" "I was amused with your account of the 'Zauberflöte,' but you know I hope soon to see you lay by all your pretty Papagena feathers. All your satins and ermines must give place to a coarse apron then. You will be only applauded by my hungry stomach, called out before the cook-wench, and saluted with 'da capo' when you kiss your Carl. It is very shocking, I know. What will my own pearl say to be dissolved in the sour vinegar of domestic life, and swallowed by a bear of a husband?"