"Oh, father! How can you say that?" cried poor Hedwig, clinging closer to Nino.

"At all events, you have acted as though you did. On the very day when I promised you to take signal action upon Baron Benoni, you left me by stealth, saying in your miserable letter that you had gone to a man who could both love and protect you."

"You did neither the one nor the other, sir," said Nino boldly, "when you required of your daughter to marry such a man as Benoni."

"I have just seen Benoni; I saw him also on the night you left me, madam," - he looked severely at Hedwig, " and I am reluctantly forced to confess that he is not sane, according to the ordinary standard of the mind."

We had all known from the paper of the suspicion that rested on Benoni's sanity, yet somehow there was a little murmur in the room when the old count so clearly stated his opinion.

"That does not, however, alter the position in the least," continued Lira, "for you knew nothing of this at the time I desired you to marry him, and I should have found it out soon enough to prevent mischief. Instead of trusting to my judgment, you took the law into your own hands, like a most unnatural daughter, as you are, and disappeared in the night with a man whom I consider totally unfit for you, however superior," he added, glancing at Nino, "he may have proved himself in his own rank of life."

Nino could not hold his tongue any longer. It seemed absurd that there should be a battle of words when all the realities of the affair were accomplished facts; but for his life he could not help speaking.

"Sir," he said, addressing Lira, "I rejoice that this opportunity is given me of once more speaking clearly to you. Months ago, when I was betrayed into a piece of rash violence, for which I at

consent.

once apologized to you, I told you under somewhat peculiar circumstances that I would yet marry your daughter, if she would have me. I stand here to-day with her by my side, my wedded wife, to tell you that I have kept my word, and that she is mine by her own free Have you any cause to show why she is not my wedded wife? If so, show it. But I will not allow you to stand there and say bitter and undeserved things to this same wife of mine, abusing the name of father and the terms authority' and 'love,' forsooth! And if you wish to take vengeance on me personally, do so if you can. I will not fight duels with you now, as I was ready to do the day before yesterday. For then-so short a time ago I had but offered her my life, and so that I gave it for her I cared not how nor when. But now she has taken me for hers, and I have no more right to let you kill me than I have to kill myself, seeing that she and I are one. Therefore, good sir, if you have words of conciliation to speak, speak them; but if you would only tell her harsh and cruel things, I say you shall not!"

As Nino uttered these hot words in good, plain Italian, they had a bold and honest sound of strength that was glorious to hear. A weaker man than the old count would have fallen into a fury of rage, and perhaps would have done some foolish violence. But he stood silent, eying his antagonist coolly, and when the words were spoken he answered.

"Signor Cardegna," he said, "the fact that I am here ought to be to you the fullest demonstration that I acknowledge your marriage with my daughter. I have certainly no intention of prolonging a painful interview. When I have said that my child has disobeyed me, I have said all that the question holds. As for the future of you two, I have naturally nothing more to say about it. I cannot love a disobedient child, nor

66

Father," she said, in tones of passionate entreaty, "will you not say you wish me well? Will you not forgive me?" She sprang to him, and would have held him back.

"I wish you no ill," he answered, shortly, pushing her aside, and he marched to the door, where he paused, bowed as stiffly as ever, and disappeared.

It was very rude of us, perhaps, but no one accompanied him to the stairs. As for me, I would not have believed it possible that any human being could be so hard and relentlessly virtuous; and if I had wondered at first that Hedwig should have so easily made up her mind to flight, I was no longer surprised when I saw with my own eyes how he could treat her.

I cannot, indeed, conceive how she could have borne it so long, for the whole character of the man came out, hard, cold, and narrow, such a character as must be more hideous than any description can paint it, when seen in the closeness of daily conversation. But when he was gone the sun appeared to shine again, as he had shone all day, though it had sometimes seemed so dark. The storms were in that little room.

As Lira went out, Nino, who had followed Hedwig closely, caught her in his arms, and once more her face rested on his broad breast. I sat down and pretended to be busy with a pile of old papers that lay near by on the table, but I

could hear what they said. The dear children, they forgot all about me.

"I am so sorry, dear one," said Nino, soothingly.

"I know you are, Nino. But it cannot be helped."

"But are you sorry, too, Hedwig?" he asked, stroking her hair. "That my father is angry? Yes. I wish he were not," said she, looking wistfully toward the door.

"No, not that," said Nino. "Sorry that you left him, I mean.”

This is the story of that Roman singer whose great genius is making such a stir in the world. I have told it to you, because he is my own dear boy, as I have often said in these pages; and because people must not think that he did wrong to carry Hedwig von Lira away from her father, nor that Hedwig was so very unfilial and heartless. I know that they were both right, and the day will come when old Lira will acknowledge it. He is a hard old man, but he must have some affection for her; and if not, he will

surely have the vanity to own so famous an artist as Nino for his son-in-law.

I do not know how it was managed, for Hedwig was certainly a heretic when she left her father, though she was an angel, as Nino said. But before they left Rome for Vienna there was a little wedding, early in the morning, in our parish church, for I was there; and De Pretis, who was really responsible for the whole thing, got some of his best singers from St. Peter and St. John on the Lateran to come and sing a mass over the two. I think that our good Mother Church found room for the dear child very quickly, and that is how it happened.

those two hearts that never knew love save for each other, and they will be happy always. For it was nothing but love with them from the very first, and so it must be to the very last. Perhaps you will say that there is nothing in this story, either, but love. And if so, it is well; for where there is naught else there can surely be no sinning, or wrongdoing, or weakness, or meanness; nor yet anything that is not quite pure and undefiled.

Just as I finish this writing, there comes a letter from Nino to say that he has taken steps about buying Serveti, and that I must go there in the spring with Mariuccia and make it ready for Dear Serveti, of course I will go. F. Marion Crawford.

THE opera in Paris is in its decline. The once famous Italiens, where Tamburini, Rubini, Mario, Pasta, Grisi, and so many other voices of enchantment gave life to the compositions of Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, was burned to the ground ten years ago, and the tradition of its composers, singers, and audience has perished with it. At the Grand Opéra, that funeral monument of the brilliant, music-fancying Second Empire, neither the best artists nor the great works of the present day are to be heard; the orchestra and chorus are less than second rate; even the scenery is shabby. The Opéra Comique has an able manager, a good company, an excellent chorus, and a small but admirable orchestra; there new operas are brought out, old ones are revived, and the gems of the national school are given regularly. Two or three times a week, Auber, Boieldieu, Méhul, Grétry, and other French composers are to be heard. But the Opéra Comique is limited by its

sex.

very calling to operas of the lighter sort, and it has no first-rate singers of either The tenors and baritones are unequal to giving even a work like Carmen its due effect. The prime donne last winter were Mademoiselle Van Zandt and Mademoiselle Nevada, young girls with charming voices and more or less talent; not artists in any sense of the term, although with study and experience they might become so. They are treated as stars, too; the curiosity felt by idlers of pleasure and seekers for novelty about a new vocalist and a new, or newly revived, opera being turned to account by the manager to draw large houses on the nights when she sings, while the threadbare stock voices are left for Les Diamans de la Couronne, Le Pré aux Clercs, and other native productions, to which the middle-class Parisian public is fondly constant. Whether at the Grand Opéra or the Comique, anybody who remembers what they both were fifteen years ago will be struck

with the present dearth of fine singers and actors, of talent and training, on the French lyric stage.

To compensate for this grievous loss, a system of concerts has gradually come into existence, which, by their excellence and steadily increasing popularity, are working a revolution in musical taste. They cannot take the place of the opera as a resort for amusement, or as a form of social intercourse, but they open a far wider field of enjoyment, and one more fruitful of true delight, to the serious amateur. The mundane element is entirely absent; there is nothing in those silent assemblages of men and women in street clothes, packed into a dirty, stuffy theatre of a winter afternoon, to recall or replace the aspect of the auditorium of the Italiens or Grand Opéra in former days. The boxes, occupied by languid ladies in full dress, with bouquets, fans, and opera-glasses, and gentlemen in evening toilet, with a capejasmine at the button-hole; the visits from box to box; the general conversation between the acts; the subdued chitchat during the music, except when a favorite singer or famous air held the lively tongues in suspense; the notorious interest of some well-known spectator -sometimes a great personage, sometimes a fair lady in certain persons on the boards, which lent excitement to their exits and entrances; the presence of the court; the arrivals and departures of birds of fashion, alighting between a dinner party and a ball to hear those other birds warble a cavatina or a finale; the curiosity and partisanship at the first performance of a new work, or the appearance of a new artist; the indefinable emotions which a combination of lyric and dramatic art only can produce; above all, the sense that the hearers belonged to the same world, that the opera house was in fact a vast drawing-room, creating a tacit accord and understanding throughout the audience, these things are wanting at the weekly con

certs of to-day. I will try and describe what there is to be had instead.

The concert is nearly as old a form of musical entertainment in Paris as the opera, and the two have grown up there side by side. The progress of their development belongs to the history of music, and would be out of place in an article which deals exclusively with the concert societies of the present period. The first of these organizations, both as regards age and excellence, is the Société des Concerts, which gives the concerts commonly known as those of the Conservatoire. It has been in existence for upwards of fifty years, and reckons among its members, living and dead, many celebrated musicians. It rose from the grave of the sacred concerts, which were created in the reign of Louis XVI., and expired under the Restoration, - a resurrection which took place on St. Cecilia's day, November, 1826, under interesting circumstances. Habeneck, the leader of the orchestra of the Conservatoire, or government school of music and declamation, asked his friends to breakfast with him on the festival of the patron saint of harmony, and to bring their instruments. He set them down first to play Beethoven's Heroic Symphony. Hours went by, and everybody forgot about breakfast until late in the short autumn afternoon, when Madame Habeneck entered, and adjured them, in the name of Beethoven, to come to dinner. This meeting gave rise to others, for the sake of practicing; but there was no regular place of assemblage until Habeneck persuaded Cherubini, the composer, then director of the Conservatoire, to obtain leave from the ministry for a few concerts to be given in the music hall of the Conservatoire. The leader and his associates agreed to supply from their scanty purses the means of advertising, heating, and lighting the hall. M. de la Rochefoucauld, the proper authority, not only gave the desired permission, but passed a decree

that the graduates of the Conservatoire should give six concerts annually, and appropriated two thousand francs from the budget to defray the original outlay. The first concert was given on the 9th of March, 1828. The programme consisted of the Heroic Symphony; a duet for soprano and contralto from Rossini's opera of Sémiramide; a solo for the cornet-à-piston, then a new instrument, composed and executed by Meifred; an air for soprano, by Rossini; a concerto for the violin, by Rode, a prolific composer; a chorus from the opera of Blanche de Provence, by Cherubini; the overture to his opera of the Abencerrages; and the Kyrie and Gloria from his Coronation Mass. The auditorium was crowded, and so it has been from that day forth at every concert of the society.

If Cherubini had more than his share of the first programme, the second was composed entirely of Beethoven's music, the concert being to his memory; the fourth was dedicated to Mozart, and the first of the second season to Haydn. A review of the programmes of those earliest years of the society's existence, as well as of its concerts last winter, shows extraordinary impartiality within certain limits. Beethoven always has the first place, other classical composers receive the second honors; modern standard musicians are more sparingly admitted, and I believe that it is a fixed practice, if not rule, of the society to perform no work which has not received the stamp of public approbation. The decision as to the acceptance of a new composition rests with a jury of twelve, chosen by lot from and by the members of the society, who have already heard it in private. There are a good many formalities prescribed by the regulations of the association, but the main difficulty lies in obtaining a first hearing. The society, to which none but a French citizen and a pupil of the Conservatoire can belong, is no doubt the highest tribunal of mu

sical criticism extant; and it is due to its severe requirements that its concerts have been maintained at the height of perfection for which they have long been proverbial.

ers.

This wholesome conservatism, however, bore hard upon youthful composA young man, who had suffered from it himself, and been forced into other occupations for want of an opening in the direction of his tastes and desires, on finding himself, later, in a position to follow his natural bent, devoted the remainder of his life to founding an association for giving concerts at which the music of unknown authors should be performed as well as that of acknowledged masters. This was M. Jules Pasdeloup, the father of the select popular concert. The orchestra which seconded him in his courageous and generous enterprise was formed by him of undergraduates of the Conservatoire, but not to the exclusion of others. The programmes at first consisted chiefly of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn; Weber and Mendelssohn were heard oftener than at the Conservatoire, and the names of rising young composers, like Gounod, Lefébure-Wély (so well known to American young ladies a quarter of a century ago by his Cloches du Monastère, and long organist at the church of the Madeleine in Paris), and St. Saëns, found a place beside those of the great dead. M. Pasdeloup's energy and enthusiasm stimulated him to the most ambitious undertakings: he introduced Mozart's Escape from the Seraglio to the Parisians, and, also, if I am not mistaken, Meyerbeer's Struensee, besides many of Schumann's compositions. His concerts met with instantaneous favor, and the halls where they were given were crowded by eager listeners, but for ten years after their foundation they did little more than pay their expenses. At length M. Pasdeloup, moved by the twofold and almost incompatible desire to bring the best music within the reach of poorer