s
ago, became famous for her wonderful performance on the violin? At six
years of age she went to a great concert, and of all the fine
instruments there, the unseen spirit within her made choice, "Papa, I
should like to learn the violin." So she learned it and loved it, and
when ten years old delighted foreign and American audiences with her
marvelous genius. It was the little Camilla who now, after ten years
of silence, tuned her beloved instrument once more.

As she walks softly and quietly in, I am conscious of a disappointment.
I had unwittingly framed for her an aesthetic violin, with the
essential strings and bridge and bow indeed, but submerged and forgot
in such Orient splendors as befit her glorious genius. Barbaric pearl
and gold, finest carved work, flashing gems from Indian watercourses,
the delicatest pink sea-shell, a bubble-prism caught and
crystallized,--of all rare and curious substances wrought with dainty
device, fantastic as a dream, and resplendent as the light, should her
instrument be fashioned. Only in "something rich and strange" should
the mystic soul lie sleeping for whom her lips shall break the spell of
slumber, and her young fingers unbar the sacred gates. And, oh me! it
is, after all, the very same old red fiddle! Dee, dee!

But she neither glides nor trips nor treads, as heroines invariably do,
but walks in like a Christian woman. She steps upon the stage and
faces the audience that gives her hearty greeting and waits the
prelude. There is time for cool survey. I am angry still about the red
fiddle, and I look scrutinizingly at her dress, and think how ugly is
the mode. The skirt is white silk,--a brocade, I believe,--at any rate,
stiff, and, though probably full to overflowing in the hands of the
seamstress, who must compress it within prescribed limits about the
waist, looks scanty and straight. Why should she not, she who comes
before us tonight, not as a fashion, but an inspiration,--why should
she not assume that immortal classic drapery whose graceful falls and
folds the sculptor vainly tries to imitate, the painter vainly seeks to
limn? When Corinne tuned her lyre at the Capitol, when she knelt to be
crowned with her laurel crown at the hands of a Roman senator, is it
possible to conceive her swollen out with crinoline? And yet I
remember, that, though sa roe etait blanche, et son costume etait tres
pittoresque, it was sans s'e carter cependant assez des usages recus
pou