f femininity.
The style is so unconscious that at times it really seems as if,
attired in wrapper and slippers, the fair narrator were lolling back
in an easy-chair talking these interesting things into your friendly
ear.

Miss Abbott is a lady for whom we have had for a number of
years--ever since her debut as a public singer--the highest esteem.
She is one of the most conscientious of women in her private walk,
conscientious in every relationship and duty and practice that go to
make the sum of her daily life. This conscientiousness, involving
patience, humility, perseverance, and integrity, has been, we think,
the real secret of her success. And no one who has watched her
steady rise from poverty to affluence, and from obscurity to fame,
will deny the proposition that the woman is genuinely successful;
and successful, too, in the best sense, and by hard American
methods. However, it shall be our attempt not to suffer our warm
personal regard for this admirable lady to color too highly our
professional estimate of the literary work now before us.

Although the "Memoirs of a Busy Life" purports to be a review merely
of the period of Miss Abbott's career as a prima donna, there are
three prefatory chapters wherein are detailed quite elaborately the
incidents of her girl-life and of her early struggles. This we view
with particular approval, the more in especial because, since Miss
Abbott's achievement of fame, a number of hitherto obscure
localities have claimed distinction as being the place of her birth.
Miss Abbott records this historical fact: "It was on the first day
of June, 1858, the month of flowers, of song and of bridals, in the
then quiet hamlet of Peoria, whose shores are laved by the waters of
the peaceful Illinois river and whose sun-kissed hills melt away
into the clouds--it was then and there that I was ushered into
life." The old family nurse, one Barbara Deacon (for whom the
grateful cantatrice has abundantly provided), recalls that at the
very moment of the infant's birth a strangely beautiful bird
fluttered down from a pear-tree, alighting upon the window-sill, and
caroled forth a wondrous song, hearing which the infant (_mirabile
dictu!_) turned over in its crib and accompanied the winged
songster's melody with an accurate second alto. This incident Miss
Abbott repeats as one of the many legends bearing upon her infancy;