The Royal Opera House next door announced a gala performance that evening. I got my ticket early, fearful of being crowded away from what promised to be my first artistic treat in a fortnight. I took pains to choose a seat near enough the front to catch each detail, yet far enough away from the orchestra not to be deafened by its Wagnerian roar—and when I arrived the orchestra seemed to have been dead for years! The place it should have occupied was filled with broken chairs and music-racks black with age, and resembled nothing so much as grandfather’s garret. A single light, somewhat more powerful than a candle, burned high up under the dome of the house and cast faint, weird flickers over its dusty regal splendor. For some reason the place was cold as an ice-house, though the weather outside was comfortable, and the scattered audience shivered audibly in its scanty _Ersatz_ garments. It was without doubt the most poorly dressed, unprepossessing little collection of hearers that I had ever seen gathered together in such an edifice. One was reminded not merely that the textile-mills of Bayreuth had only paper to work with now, but that soap had become an unattainable luxury in Germany. Plainly _das Volk_ had taken over the exiled king’s playhouse for itself. Even the ornate old royal loge was occupied by a few patched soldiers and giggling girls of the appearance of waitresses. But to what purpose? Surely such an audience as this could not find entertainment in one of Germany’s classics! Alas! it was I who had been led astray! The promising title of the play announced was mere camouflage. Who perpetrated the incomprehensible, inane rubbish on which the curtain finally rose, and why, are questions I willingly left to the howling audience, which dodged back and forth, utterly oblivious of the fact that the Royal Opera House had been erected before theater-builders discovered that it was easier to see between two heads than through one. Surely German _Kultur_, theatrically at least, was on the down-grade in Bayreuth.