tle Garden, I listened to that
rarest of infant phenomena, Adelina Patti, poised in an armchair that
had been pushed to the footlights and announcing her incomparable gift.
She was about of our own age, she was one of us, even though at the same
time the most prodigious of fairies, of glittering fables. That
principle of selection was indeed in abeyance while I sat with my mother
either at Tripler Hall or at Niblo's--I am vague about the occasion, but
the names, as for fine old confused reasons, plead alike to my pen--and
paid a homage quite other than critical, I dare say, to the then
slightly worn Henrietta Sontag, Countess Rossi, who struck us as
supremely elegant in pink silk and white lace flounces and with whom
there had been for certain members of our circle some contact or
intercourse that I have wonderingly lost. I learned at that hour in any
case what "acclamation" might mean, and have again before me the vast
high-piled auditory thundering applause at the beautiful pink lady's
clear bird-notes; a thrilling, a tremendous experience and my sole other
memory of concert-going, at that age, save the impression of a strange
huddled hour in some smaller public place, some very minor hall, under
dim lamps and again in my mother's company, where we were so near the
improvised platform that my nose was brushed by the petticoats of the
distinguished amateur who sang "Casta Diva," a very fine fair woman with
a great heaving of bosom and flirt of crinoline, and that the ringletted
Italian gentleman in black velvet and a romantic voluminous cloak who
represented, or rather who professionally and uncontrollably was, an
Improvisatore, had for me the effect, as I crouched gaping, of quite
bellowing down my throat. That occasion, I am clear, was a concert for a
charity, with the volunteer performance and the social patroness, and it
had squeezed in where it would--at the same time that I somehow connect
the place, in Broadway, on the right going down and not much below
Fourth Street (except that everything seems to me to have been just
below Fourth Street when not just above,) with the scene of my great
public exposure somewhat later, the wonderful exhibition of Signor
Blitz, the peerless conjurer, who, on my attending his entertainment
with W. J. and our frequent comrade of the early time "Hal" Coster,
practised on my innocence to seduce me to the stage and there plunge me
into the shame of my sad failure to account arithmetica