about whispering (very cautiously and low, for if that big bird the Double Eagle had been aware of him he would have stopped his whispering for good), that there was another reason for the Bagdanoff's secession from the Académie at Paris. The French, this little bird said, quite confidently though quietly-the French wouldn't have her! She had rehearsed, and the minister of state had shaken his head. The Jockey-club had presented a petition against her. The abonnés had drawn up a memorial against her. They considered her to be inimical to French interests. Two feuilletonistes of the highest celebrity and social position had declared publicly that they would decline and return the retaining fee, sent by débutantes and accepted by feuilletonistes, as a matter of course, in such cases. In fact, the Bagdanoff was crêvée before she ever saw the French foot-lights twinkle, and if she had not pirouetted away Due North as fast as her ten toes would permit her, she would in another week have been caricatured in the Journal pour Rire -figuration in which formidable journal is equivalent to civil death on the conti

nent.

All of which minor gossip on things theatrical and operatic you may imagine, if you like, to have been useful to wile away the time this hot afternoon. Signor Fripanelli and I have been dining at Madame Aubin's French table d'hôte at the corner of the Cannouschuïa or Great Stable Street; and have agreed to visit the Circus Theatre in the evening, to see Lucrezia Borgia the opera: music by the usual Donizetti, but words translated into Russ. I anticipated a most awful evening of maxillary bones-breaking sounds. Fancy "Di pescatore ignobile" in Sclavonic!

Fripanelli and yours truly have proceeded, dinner being over, to Dominique's café on the Nevskoï, there to do the usual coffee and chasse; and at the door of that dreary and expensive imitation of BigLons or Richards stands the Signor's droschky (for Frip is a prosperous genLeman; gives you, at his own rooms, as good Lafitte as you can obtain on this side Tilsit; and has a private droschky to himself, neat, shining lamps, tall horse,

and coachman in a full suit of India-rubber.) "One mast 'ave, oun po di louxe," a little luxury, the Signor tells me, as if to apologise for his turn out. "If I vas drive op ze Princess Kapoustikoff vith Ischvostchik, sapete, fifty copeck, zay would take two rouble from my next lesson. Ah! quel pays! quel pays !"

"Imagine yourself," (to translate his polyglot into something approximating to English,) he tells me as we sip the refreshing Mocha and puff at the papiros, "Imagine yourself, I go to the Countess Panckschka. She receive me, how? As the maestro di canto? Of none. I sit at the pianoforte, and open the book and wait to hear that woman sing false as water, that which always she do. Is it that she sing? Of none. She sits and makes little plaits in her robe, and spins little gold toys and says, Signor Fripanelli, what is there of news en ville? Tell me, I pray you, all the cancans you heard last night at the Princess Kapoustikoff's. What, devil! I go to-morrow to the Kapoustikoff's, and she says, Tell me, Signor of mine, what is there of new en ville, and who are the imbecile whom that old woman ugly, the Countess Panckschka, can now pursuade to enter her faded saloons. Deity of mine, this they call taking lessons of the song! And if you do not take cancans; if you say that you are a master of music, and not a merchant of news; they will write to you a billet with but this sole line in it, Monsieur, je ne vous connais plus, Sir, I know you no longer; and no longer will they know you, or the two, five, eight hundred roubles they owe you, besides their bad tongues, ruining your fame and honor in salons with histories of lies that you kuow not your art; that you are of the Jew, and have been galerian, là bas, down there with letters marked on your back for theft of watches from mantlepiece, and have wife without bread in Bergamo, whom in the time you bastinadoed because she would not dance on the cord, (the tight rope, I presume.)"

The recital of Fripanelli's woes carries us well out of Dominique's, and his droschky takes us at an enlivening rate towards the theatre. Frip has been years in

Petersburg, yet I question whether he has ever walked ten miles in it since his arrival. "What to do?" he asks, lifting up his hands, and shrugging up his shoulders. "To walk where? Among these wild men savage, these barbarous ? Of not." He knows the Nevskoï, the Italianskaïa, the English and Palace Quays, the two Morskaïa's and the Litennaïa because in those streets his aristocratic patrons reside. He has heard of Wassily-Ostrow, and has been (in a gondola) to Kammenoï-Ostrow, the Princess or the Countess Panckschka having a châlet there in the summer; also to Tsarski-Selo, and even as far as Pavlowsk by railway, for he gives lessons to one of the Grand Duchesses. He has seen the outside of the Gostinnoï Dvor; but he is quite ignorant of what manner of markets exist behind that stately edifice. He knows not the Gorokhovaïa from Adam; and if you were to tell him that the Nevskoï started from the shores of the Neva, at right-angles to it, and ended three miles off, still on the shores of the Neva, and still at right-angles thereto, he would stare with astonishment. I could show you full a score foreign residents in Petersburg who are brethren in ignorance to Fripanelli, and have been as long in Russia, and know as little of it as he.

fine

This good-natured little music-master is madly in love with the Queen of Sheba. He is most respectful and quite hopeless in his attachment, never telling his love to its object, but allowing concealment to prey on his olive cheek. Watching him however at his music lessons, while the Queen is singing, (and she sings divinely) I catch him furtively wiping his right eyelid with the extreme end of a very cambric handkerchief. He composes romances and cavatinas for the Queen to sing, which, when she sings, makes him urticate his eyelid more than ever. weeps frequently to me over coffee on the subject. Elle n'a pas de l'ame. "She has not of the soul," he says. "If she knew how to shed the tears as well as how to beam the smiles, she would be la Donna of the world. But she cannot.

He

We heard Lucrezia Borgia, and I confess that I was most agreeably disappointed. I became convinced that the epithet "soft flowing Russ" is one eminently due to the mother tongue of our late enemies. It is, indeed, for vocal purposes a most mellifluous and harmonious language, and, for softness and euphony, is about five hundred per cent. more suited to musical requirements than the French language. As to its superiority over our own (for singing,) I at once, and candidly admit it. I don't think that from my due northern antecedents, I shall be accused of entertaining any very violent Russian sympathies, or that I shall be denounced as an emissary of the Czar in disguise, when I appeal to all linguists to bear me out in the assertion, that our own English tongue is the very worst language in the world for singing. There is an incessant hiss in the pronunciation which is as annoying as it is productive of cacaphony; and I would sooner hear Lucrezia half-a-dozen times over, in Russ than in English. As to the opera itself, it was, as I dare say it is all the world over-at the Scala, the Pergola, and the Fenice; at the St. Charles at New Or leans, at the opera in Pera, at the Tacon theatre in Havannah, at our own great houses, or in country theatres, occupied for the nonce by some peripatetic op ara company-always beautiful, glorious, fresh, and one which shall endure for aye like the grand old marbles of those who have gone before, though legions of Goth and Vandals, though myriads of Keem Kimos and My Mary Anns shall hav desecrated its altars and profaned it hearth.