We had as musical director a very young Italian, who had led the orchestra of the Grand Opera at Havana, and he managed to lead our musicians into the most unconscionable difficulties and misunderstandings. I cannot conceive how in the world he did it, but he had them continually by the ears. At one rehearsal there was such a jealous _mêlée_ that a veteran violinist, an irascible old German, was forced to leave his wig behind him on the stage and retreat precipitately, with no more hair on his head than there is on a hairdressers block. Indeed, as his smooth occiput disappeared through the dressing-room door, it resembled nothing so much as a back view of one of those familiar ornaments of a wig-maker’s window. The business manager of this company was a character that has puzzled me a great deal,--a human riddle that I solve a new way every time I attempt it. The last solution, too, is always sure to be just contrary to the one immediately preceding. The name of this moustached Sphinx was “Governor” Dorr, or that, at least, was the name he went under. How he got, or what right he had to, either his title or surname I do not know. He had gambled for thousands in California, and been an adventurer in every land. He knew Shakespeare, seemingly, by heart. His common conversation was full of the turgid phrase and movement of melodrama. His presence anywhere was a constant sensation. There was a strange mixture of treachery and generous good-fellowship in the expression of his face. When younger, before a long course of dissipation had left its marks upon him, he must have been very handsome. He was yet tall and tolerably erect, and the excessive measure of the liquor he had consumed showed itself, not so much in his face as in that peculiar bend to the knees, when walking, which the acute observer will always find the surest test of the confirmed Bacchanalian. There is a kind of life that never gets into books,--a species of villany that floats ethereally just above the atmosphere of the courts. The newspaper reporter does not quite grasp it, and so it remains without its literature. Of a quarter-century or more of this indescribable sort of life Governor Dorr had skimmed the cream, as I may say. All that was worldly he knew, from the infinitesimal series of negative physical pleasures to the most abstruse calculus of positive crime. The idea of a virtuous home, of children, and of scenes that are so common in every-day life was to him, I am sure, a memory of remote years. He saw all these things from the outside, and lived, even in his most lavish prosperity, in the very worst of homelessness. Yet I have seen him manifest simplicity as honest as a child’s, and a tenderness in which there could be no counterfeit.