nsible. With
commendable candor she told young Wetherell that she had certain
high ambitions or duties which she was determined to follow at the
sacrifice of every selfish consideration; if he were willing to wait
for her until she saw her way clear to the accomplishment of those
duties, she would then link her destiny indissolubly with his. To
this the young druggist acceded.

In 1877 Emma was enabled to go to Paris to perfect her music
studies. Certain wealthy members of Dr. Bellow's church provided her
with the financial means, which she accepted as a loan, to be paid
in due season. In chapter four of the memoirs we are regaled with an
instructive record of Emma's voyage across the Atlantic, her
admiration of the magnitude of the ocean, her consciousness of man's
utter helplessness should storms arise and drive the ship upon
hidden rocks, etc., etc. In the next chapter she laments the
exceeding depravity of Paris, and expresses wonderment that in so
fair a city humanity should abandon itself to such godless and
damnable practices. These things we refer to because they show the
serious, not to say pious, trend of the young woman's mind. In one
place she says: "I thank God that my Eugene is tending a drug-store
in Brooklyn instead of being surrounded by the divers temptations of
this modern Babylon; for, circumspect and pure though he may be by
nature, hardly could he be environed by all this wretchedness
without receiving some taint therein."

While she was in Paris she became acquainted with the great Gounod
and with the brilliant but erratic Offenbach. Gounod introduced her
to many of the greatest composers and singers. Among her friendliest
acquaintances she numbered Wagner and Liszt. The latter wrote her a
sonata to sing, and Wagner tried to get her permission for him to
introduce her into the trilogy he was then at work upon. Meissonier
made an exquisite study of her, and the younger Dumas made her the
heroine of one of his brightest comedies, "La Petite Americaine."
There was one man, however, whom our heroine would not suffer to be
introduced to her; that man was Zola. She would never recognize in
her list of acquaintances, so she told Gounod with an angry stamp of
her tiny foot, any man who debased his God-given talents to smut and
lubricity.

In 1879 Miss Abbott returned to her native land, fully prepared to
engage in the professi