On the whole, though in the midst of my difficulties I had been worried a little by interviewers, the San Francisco papers gave me good words at parting. One of them explained my pecuniary failure not by the scandal which Ravelli's conduct had caused, but by my having played to popular prices, instead of the exceptionally high ones which I had charged when the year before Patti was singing for me, and receiving at the time payment at the rate of £1,000 a night. "Opera," said the journal in question, "is regarded as a luxury, to enjoy which its votaries are willing to pay liberally. High prices are its illusion, and when put down to current rates the romance of the thing is destroyed. Mapleson did not appear to understand this, and his deficiency of the knowledge has caused him to leave us almost a bankrupt by his San Francisco venture. It is admitted on all hands that he had a splendid troupe, but the fact of his performing to what are known as popular prices, and complications arising with certain members of his troupe, seem to deprive him of his usual success." "By the way," said a writer in the paper called _Truth_, "I notice that Mapleson is said to be indebted to Ravelli for 6,000 dollars, though an artist notoriously never permits an impresario to owe him more than a few performances. [It was proved in Court that I owed him nothing.] At home, as everybody knows, in their own country they receive in about a year as much as they are paid in a month in America, the streets of which the average Italian singer imagines to be paved with gold coins. As to the success or failure of the venture of the impresario they are supremely indifferent, but pertinaciously continue to demand the utmost farthing, no matter how badly things may be going. Lyric artists are, as a rule, the most grossly ignorant people on all subjects, except their own special art, and money. They are intensely conceited and abominably selfish, and regard an impresario as their natural prey. The sums that Ravelli has received from Mapleson in the last few years are beyond question sufficient to maintain the tenor in comfort and luxury for the rest of his life. Yet the moment he fails to receive his _quid pro quo_ he refuses to render his services, denouncing his manager as a swindler, and abandons him at a moment when by loyalty and a little patience he could have aided in relieving the ill-fortune which must inevitably be anticipated in operatic affairs. Of course on general commercial principles the labourer is worthy of his hire; but in operatic matters the hire is, as a rule, so entirely out of proportion to the services rendered, and the conditions of the enterprise so unlike any other venture, that a little latitude certainly ought to be allowed." I found on my arrival at Chicago that one of the Chicago papers had, at the beginning of my troubles, published the following telegram from its correspondent at San Francisco:--