ched, by graceful cross-bands over her white stockings, to her
solid ankles--an emphatic sign of the time; not less than I recover my
surprised sense of their supporting her without loss of balance,
substantial as she was, in the "first position"; her command of which,
her ankles clapped close together and her body very erect, was so
perfect that even with her toes, right and left, fairly turning the
corner backward, she never fell prone on her face.

It consorted somehow with this wealth of resource in her that she
appeared at the soirees, or at least at the great fancy-dress soiree in
which the historic truth of my experience, free lemonade and all, is
doubtless really shut up, as the "genius of California," a dazzling
vision of white satin and golden flounces--her brother meanwhile
maintaining that more distinctively European colour which I feel to have
been for my young presumption the convincing essence of the scene in the
character of a mousquetaire de Louis Quinze, highly consonant with his
type. There hovered in the background a flushed, full-chested and
tawnily short-bearded M. Dubreuil, who, as a singer of the heavy order,
at the Opera, carried us off into larger things still--the Opera having
at last about then, after dwelling for years, down town, in shifty tents
and tabernacles, set up its own spacious pavilion and reared its head as
the Academy of Music: all at the end, or what served for the end, of our
very street, where, though it wasn't exactly near and Union Square
bristled between, I could yet occasionally gape at the great bills
beside the portal, in which M. Dubreuil always so serviceably came in at
the bottom of the cast. A subordinate artist, a "grand utility" at the
best, I believe, and presently to become, on that scene, slightly ragged
I fear even in its freshness, permanent stage-manager or, as we say
nowadays, producer, he had yet eminently, to my imagination, the richer,
the "European" value; especially for instance when our air thrilled, in
the sense that our attentive parents re-echoed, with the visit of the
great Grisi and the great Mario, and I seemed, though the art of
advertisement was then comparatively so young and so chaste, to see our
personal acquaintance, as he could almost be called, thickly sandwiched
between them. Such was one's strange sense for the connections of things
that they drew out the halls of Ferrero till these too seemed fairly to
resound with Norma and Lucrezia Bo