quite frankly, appreciating at once the
fact that it was through them that he could express to the people of
America his intense feeling of thanks for the singular warmth of
America's greeting.

From seeing all these visitors the Prince had only time left to get
into evening dress and to be whirled off in time to attend a glittering
dinner given at the Waldorf-Astoria by Mrs. Henry Pomeroy Davidson on
behalf of the Council of the American Red Cross. It was a vivid and
beautiful function, but it was one that bridged the time before
another, and before ten o'clock the Prince was on the move again, and,
amid the dance of the motor-bike "cops," was being rushed off to the
Metropolitan Opera House.

He was swung down Broadway where the advertisements made a fantasy of
the sky, a fantasy of rococo beauty where colours on the huge pallets
of skyscrapers danced and ran, fused and faded, grouped and regrouped,
each a huge and coherent kaleidoscope.

Here a gigantic kitten of lights turned a complete somersault in the
heavens as it played with a ball of wool. There six sky-high manikins
with matchstick limbs, went through an incandescent perpetual and
silent dance. In the distance was a gigantic bull advertising
tobacco--all down this heavenly vista there were these immense signs,
lapping and over-lapping in dazzling chaos. And seen from one angle,
high up, unsupported, floating in the very air and eerily
unsubstantial, was a temple lit by bale-fires that shone wanly at its
base. It was merely a building superimposed upon a skyscraper, but in
the dark there was no skyscraper, and the amazing structure hung there
lambent, silent, enigmatic, a Wagnerian temple in the sky.

Broadway, which sprouts theatres as a natural garden sprouts flowers,
was jewelled with lights, lights that in the clear air of this
continent shone with a lucidity that we in England do not know. Before
the least lighted of these buildings the Prince stopped. He had
arrived at the austere temple of the high arts, the Metropolitan Opera
House.

Inside Caruso and a brilliant audience waited impatiently for his
presence. The big and rather sombre house was quick with colour and
with beauty. The celebrated "Diamond Horseshoe," the tiers of the
galleries, and the floor of the house were vivid with dresses,
shimmering and glinting with all the evasive shades of the spectrum,
with here a flash of splendid jewels, there the slow and sumptuous
flutter of