acters had come to life; while in the charming Miss Isabel Jay I had the one woman on the London stage who filled the eye as well as the ear in her rendering of the part of the wayward but captivating Olivia.

Keen interest was felt in the presentation. "The Vicar" had not been seen in London since Henry Irving had put on a version of the story under the title of "Olivia," though Sir Arthur Sullivan, I understood, intended to set the old romance to music, and had made a number of sketches to that end.

My production was such a surprise to a representative of the Opéra Comique from Paris, who was in one of the boxes on the first night, that he declared it pressed hard anything he had ever seen at his own theatre.

After a period of fluctuating attendance and toward the close of our two months' season, my opera was visited by agents of the Schubert brothers and these two hardened theatregoers were so moved by the beauty and pathos of the piece that they cabled their employers. As a result I was again offered a New York production by them. But I had had enough; the elusive game was not worth the theatrical candle, which burns so readily at both ends. "The Vicar of Wakefield" I find in my memoranda to be numbered as the 1404th work I had performed up to that time.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

SPEAKING WITH TONGUES

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. - Wordsworth.

DISAPPOINTED in "The Vicar of Wakefield" in London, but aware of the need for taking the good with the ill in my journey through life, I started on my prearranged American tour in the autumn of 1907, beginning with a recital of my own at Carnegie Hall.

After wandering in my native land much farther than "from Dan to Beersheba," I found myself giving one of my recitals in Boston on December I at Symphony Hall, a place associated with perfect productions. I had appeared there satisfactorily on many previous occasions, but now my accompanist had no sooner seated himself at the piano and struck a full chord with his foot on the pedal than everybody knew something was wrong. The pedal stuck so that no effort induced it to let go its hold. My audience, at first patient, began to fidget, and I to perspire from sheer nervousness. Finally I asked if there were any one in the audience accustomed to pianos, begging him to come on the stage and adjust the balky mechanism. A man accordingly stepped up on the platform, got himself under the piano, and indulged in physical contortions that mightily amused the people. No other good piano being available and this instrument having failed us, in the attempt to proceed an old, dirty, tuneless upright instrument was found in some out-ofthe-way place, dragged on the stage, and my concert proceeded to its uncomfortable and unworthy conclusion.

Early in 1908 I had the opportunity of meeting and singing with Madame Teresa Carreño, under the conductorship of Wassili Safonoff, then directing the Philharmonic Orchestra of New York, and again on the occasion of a memorial concert with music by the late Edward A. MacDowell at Carnegie Hall, on the evening of March 31, when as so often both before and since I brought forward a number of carefully selected songs by that representative American composer, whose career illness ruined and death brought to a close, all too soon for the good of our national art. Listening to the distinguished Madame Carreño play his Piano Concerto, I could not help thinking of the story so often told of this talented but much married lady, of whom a reviewer in Europe once said of her concert of the preceding day that "She performed for the first time the second concerto of her third husband."

Filled with the desire to become a tragedian or comedian, I did not care which, after my success in the "Midsummer Night's Dream" I prepared with great care a condensation of the dialogue of Sophocles's "Antigone," using Plumptre's translation, and performing this for the first time it had been given in many years. I recited it with the Orpheus Club in Philadelphia on February 8. The chorus of the club, augmented to 120 men and conducted by Horatio Parker, gave a majestic rendering of the noble choruses. As I delivered the stirring lines, which I have done since many times, I could not help contrasting my rendering of this tragedy with Shakespeare's comedy, and remembered the story told of David Garrick, greatest of English tragedians, who was also a fine comedian. It is said that when one of his friends, congratulating him upon his skill in either phase of the dramatic art, asked him which he preferred, Garrick after a moment's thought replied that tragedy with its noble lines was certainly grateful. "But comedy? Ah, comedy is a very serious matter."

Ever interested in the growth of music by American composers, I gave on April 18, 1909, at Carnegie Hall an orchestral concert on behalf of the American Music Society, when besides orchestral music by MacDowell, Chadwick, Arthur Powell, and Harry Rowe Shelley, I included in the program the prelude to William J. McCoy's music drama "The Hamadryads," so successfully performed by the Bohemian Club in the redwood forest of California. I also recited with orchestra Poe's "Raven" to Mr. Bergh's music, and produced for the first time in New York the four songs with viola obbligato by Charles Martin Loeffler of Boston, a musician American by adoption and long residence, but most modernly French in his compositions.

In the spring of 1909 I made one of many journeys to the Pacific Coast and had the pleasure, on March 27, 1909, of giving a recital in the Greek Theatre at the University of California. Before going on the stage I was thoughtfully taken to peep through the curtain into the vast auditorium lest I should be overcome by its majestic dimensions and make undue effort to fill a space so vast. The Greek Theatre is nearly perfect acoustically and it was not necessary to sing more forcibly than in an ordinary concert hall. When I rendered in the open air Schubert's beautiful "Hark! Hark! the Lark," through the delicacy of the music birds could be heard singing in the trees overlooking and overhanging the back of the auditorium. The Right Honorable James Bryce, the British ambassador, was sitting there with President Benjamin Ide Wheeler of the University, who assured me afterward that the slightest sound of my voice could be heard perfectly despite the distance that separated them from the stage.

In San Francisco that year I was entertained, for the first time since the disaster that destroyed so much of it, at the temporary quarters of the Bohemian Club, myself reciting "The Raven." After resuming my place at table I saw that my friend Charles K. Field, a kinsman of the poet Eugene Field, was writing upon the back of his menu, though carrying on an animated conversation the while. Presently he asked me quietly, "You will not mind, I hope, anything done at your expense; we chaff each other a good deal in this club." I assured him he need have no fear of my taking offense. Motioning to a clever amateur pianist, the two took the platform I had just left and gave a travesty of both the words and music of "The Raven." The accompanist had caught marvelously the principal themes, which he wove into popular music of the day, mingled with strains from the Wagnerian parts in which he had heard me, while Field not only parodied the verses, but caricatured me and satirized the management of the club, giving at the close the tragic line, "Tea and toast, and nothing more!"

Later that season I took part in the music festival given at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, under such distinguished direction and general circumstances that these events have become noted throughout America for their artistic value. To Professor Peter