The rehearsal was very "undress" indeed. The house, not half lighted, had yet fewer spectators than jets of gas,--a handful of shadowy figures, hid away by twos and threes in the dim boxes; which were almost too dark for the reading of libretti. However eyes were young, and the party put their heads together and began to study out the coming opera, and so get a taste of the pleasure beforehand. Until--Well, as I said, Miriam was young and ignorant of the World, but a woman's instincts (if they have not been tampered with) outgrow her years and are independent of her experience. And as the girl bent over the libretto, some of these instincts took fright. She found out suddenly that those small pages were not just the reading she liked, with a gentleman looking over her shoulder; and instantly sat back, leaving the rest to their studies, and read not another word that night. She kept still, waiting for the music,--and then the music began. You who see such places only with all the conjuring power of light and dress upon them, have no idea how they look when things are transformed back again, and Cinderella has lost her glass slippers, and the coach is a pumpkin, and the coachman is a rat. This night the actors came on the stage in more--or less--than ordinary dress; as men look when they have put on their dowdiest, for bad weather or dirty work: and these men wore their hats. Only the young Prima Donna was bare-headed, and of course (being a woman) had not made herself a fright. "Can a maid forget her ornaments?" And this just touched off the effect of all the rest. But the music!-- The many discords and melodies of life since then have at last confused in Miriam's recollection the sounds she listened to that night; but for years liter she could hear them almost as distinctly as at first; and the _picture_ has never faded. The slim, fair girl; the rough, unwashed, unkempt-looking men; men whom (had she been _your_ sister) you would not have let touch her--as we say--"with a pair of tongs."