his stick and burst into tears, and tears were often seen streaming down Balfe's face when he conducted the "Figlia del Regimento" at Covent Garden. Her shake held people breathless; her voix voilée seemed to carry them up to the stars. I remember her singing Sullivan's setting of George Herbert's "Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright." The dreamlike echoes of the notes still linger in my ear; it was something unearthly-far away; like the cry of a wild bird lost in the sunset. To say that she had a soprano dramatico and soprano sfogato in one-that her compass extended from B below to G on fourth line above, may be very true, but Queen Victoria said the best thing when she declared that the "charm" of Jenny's voice was "quite indescribable," and so we had better leave it alone.

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On the 16th of April 1847 (the year of his death), Mendelssohn was walking up and down the western side of Belgrave Square one afternoon, watching the house of Mr. Grote in Eccleston Street. At last a four-wheeled cab drove up, and a plainly dressed, tired-looking girl alighted with her maid; but she brightened up at the sight of Mendelssohn. Mrs. Grote thought she looked scared and tired; but that very night she accompanied her hostess to Her Majesty's Theatie. Presently Mr. Lumley came into the box on the grand tier; very soon all the house knew that Jenny Lind was there. Lablache was singing in the Puritani," but few people present that night attended to anything but the retiring figure who sat a little in the shade, and whispered to Mrs. Grote as she watched the efforts of the prima donna, "I think I can do as well as that and perhaps a little better." But days went on and the fortunes of Lumley and Her Majesty's kept very low, and still Jenny would not attend a rehearsal. Strange, inscrutable temperament. She had come over at an enormous salary on purpose to appear, and now she only craved to be let off. She said she was frightened of Lablache, who afterward became her staunch adviser and friend." He is a father to us all," she once said. She was alarmed at the size of the house, alarmed at the public, terrified at Bunn, who threatened to prosecute her, afraid of herself. When at last she learned that Lumley was on the point of ruin, she yielded to the combined press

ure of Mendelssohn, Mr. Grote, Lablache, and Balfe, and consented to attend a rehearsal. From that moment she threw herself utterly into the work, was always first to come to the practices and last to leave. She electrified the band, and electrified every body, down to the call-boys and stage carpenters, who were wild about her. Her long delay and vacillation was perhaps the finest, though quite the most unpremeditated, advertisement she could have contrived. The public curiosity was now up to fever pitch. On the night of her appearance every approach to the theatre was thronged from an early hour by a constantly increasing crowd, which soon impeded the traffic. By the time the doors were open the file of carriages seemed interminable, and then an ugly rush took place. Strong men were carried off their legs, and women were mercilessly bruised and trampled upon. In a few minutes there was not standing room in the house. The Queen, the Prince Consort, and the Duchess of Kent were in the Royal box, Mendelssohn sat in the stalls, with his friend, Mr. Grote, the historian, and all the rank and fashion in town were there that memorable night. Jenny Lind sang her favorite part of Alice in "Robert the Devil." From the first moment of her appearance the excitement went on increasing. Such ait, such nature, such interest, such dignity combined, had never been seen on that stage before. The exclamations which fel! from the lips of the Queen were: "What a beautiful singer!"

"What an actress !'' "How charming!" "I had never seen Her Majesty moved to such enthusiasm," writes Mr. Lumley; "indeed, when Jenny Lind was summoned before the curtain, the Queen with her own hands cast at the feet of the young prima donna a superb bouquet of flowers, which lay before her in the Royal box.' Lablache speaking to Her Majesty afterward, observed: "I must say that I never heard anything like it before." From this moment the triumph of Jenny in England was assured. Of course Jenny Lind after her London triumph had to visit the provinces. Nothing like her progress had ever been known. Her portrait as the Vivandière in the "Daughter of the Regiment" was in every shop window, and cuts of Jenny as the Sonnambula were in every ale-house. Even cottages in remote country places boasted of litho

graphs of Jenny Lind, in the low-neck dress and deep lace "Bertha" of the period. The artisans turned out in crowds to catch a glimpse of her, though they knew they could never hear her voice. Her route was telegraphed all along the lines, and crowds waited for her at the stations, as they have waited since for Garibaldi or Mr. Gladstone.

The famous Norwich episode has been immortalized by the pen of Arthur Stanley, late Dean of Westminster, who was then a youth. Stanley, his father, was the Bishop of Norwich, and had invited Jenny to stay at the Palace,-in those days an unprecedented and even risky compliment for a prelate to pay to an ac

tress.

6

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On the day of her arrival Mrs. Stanley writes: "The bells were rung, and the whole town was in an uproar. After her arrival at the Palace, I went to her room and found a poor creature in the last stage of exhaustion, looking ready to sink into the earth with fatigue; and no wondershe had sung at Edinburgh till 3, then got into the train and travelled all night." The excitement at St. Andrew's Hall next day is thus described: She looked very nervous at first, but I never saw anything so beautiful as ber manner in coming forward on the orchestra, and receiving the thunders of welcome-a mixture of modesty, dignity, grateful feeling, yet perfectly unruffled-her voice was more wonderful than ever, like the warbling of birds. Was she always received with such transports?' I ventured to ask. Ah, Madame, -je suis gaté,' she replied. Her face at times wore an expression of deep thought and melancholy, yet she says, how happy she is, what rière' God has enabled her to go through, I alluded to the good effects of her example on others. Voilà ce que j'espere!' she said simply." I should like to extract the whole of Mrs. Stanley's charming letter. Still more graphic, if possible, is that of A. P. Stanley, who was completely smitten with the Lind fever, and dwells on the grace, the dignity, the joyousness and touching pathos of her entrance on the platform-the manner of a Princess, the simplicity of a child, and the goodness of an angel.' "Coming back from the concert," writes Stanley, "I rode on the outside of the second carriage, in which sat the wonderful creature

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herself the crowd rushing after with enthusiastic cheers." I cannot omit adding the touch of anticlimax which is quite in Stanley's best manner. He called it, "Her opinion of me!" Stanley was notoriously insensible to the attractions of music, which made his idolatry of the Lind all the more remarkable. On the last day I told her that there was' quelque chose d'extraordinaire dans sa voix,' but that otherwise her singing in itself produced no impression whatever upon me. This she said was by far the most amusing thing she had heard and that she should never forget it!"'

And now the rest must be very briefly

told.

After a season of unparalleled success (1847) she left England in response to the imperious calls of Germany. Her dislike of stage life seemed to grow steadily upon her, and she was firmly resolved to retire, though only twenty-seven years old. We know how her resolution broke down for the last time when, on her return to England, she found her generous friend and admirer Mr. Lumley again on the brink of ruin, and consented to reestablish his fortune by a farewell series of performances. But these were positively her last appearances on the stage, and no bribes or entreaties ever shook her resolution again. How Mr. Barnum then stepped in, and induced her to visit America; how Otto Goldschmidt-most graceful of pianists, and a perfect accompanist, whom she had known and respected for some years-played for her throughout her Transatlantic tour, and had the good fortune to woo and to win her for his own; how she took the whole of America by storm-as much as £130 being given for a single ticket at Richmond; and how she devoted the whole of her American gains, £30,000, to the institutions and charities of her native land; how, on her return, she devoted herself in like manner to English charities on a colossal scale, built a hospital at Liverpool, a new wing to the Brompton Hospital, an infirmary at Norwich, and so forth; all these things have now become parts of nineteenth-century history which can never be forgotten, on account of their deep spiritual significance as well as their material splendor.

Her dramatic success as an oratorio singer was equal to her supremacy on the

shire as Ireland. The other is different and is highly characteristic, but its characteristicness is not due to anything specially erratic in its architecture or pretentious in its intention, but simply to the depth of decay, a decay long-continued and melancholy even for Ireland, which has overtaken it, and to an even greater extent the house up to which it leads a house which we approach along an avenue greener than many grass fields, green with that peculiarly clinging vegetation which grows upon deserted roadways, and where in spring-time certain delicate flowering weeds, otherwise rare in the district, may be found by the curious in such matters. Sir Thomas and Lady Barrington are at present the occupants of the larger and more prosperous of these two houses, but they have nothing to say to my story. The Barringtons are, in fact, quite newcomers into the county of C- Bally brophy House having been only bought by Sir Thomas's father at the death of the late Lord Ballybrophy, who died here a bachelor, and at whose death the title accordingly became extinct.

Mount Kennedy, the other and dilapidated house, belongs also to Sir Thomas Barrington, and it has often been a matter of wonder, especially to strangers, why he should like to keep anything so forlorn and eye-afflicting in its ruinousness so close to his own, rather noticeably spick-and-span abode. Probably the explanation is to be found in the fact that, being uninhabited for nearly a century, it had long before his time reached a stage of dilapidation which rendered any hope of letting or otherwise disposing of it hopeless; while, on the other hand, there is a well-understood reluctance, strongly felt in Ireland, against pulling down and so utterly abolishing and rooting out the memory of those who have once lived and reigned' on any given spot, a reluctance naturally increased by the peculiar circumstances under which this house of Mount Kennedy passed out of the hands of its former owner.

A small but delightful little stream, rapid, babbling, confidential, ending in a dancing, tossing imp of a waterfall, is only to be reached down this green approach and through a portion of the neglected shrubberies which cover this part of the Barrington property, and this circumstance has several times lately brought me

within sight of the derelict house. Last time it did so I was alone, and curiosity induced me to approach nearer to it than I had ever hitherto done. On doing so I discovered that a piece of one side of the once solid entrance-porch had, apparently recently, fallen in, doubtless from the sudden rotting of some of the timbers beneath, and that though the front door still remained rigidly bolted and barred, one could now easily peep in, and little by little distinguish nearly the whole of the entrance hall, from one of the mouldering walls of which a couple of huge elks' horns still branched colossally; while beyond, through a half-open door, I could see a corner of what had evidently been one of the living rooms, with part of an enormous fireplace, black, or rather greenish gray, with that insidious mouldiness which in this climate inevitably overtakes and makes its own everything that has been submitted to it. There was something, I thought, peculiarly piteous in the suggestion thus called up of what had doubtless once been a warm hearth, lit as Irish hearths in this neighborhood are wont to be, by a mountain of red glowing turf, warmed, too, as I could not doubt, with other cheering elements, such as friendship, hospitality, family love and jollity, now forever blackened and extinguished, given over to darkness, emptiness, and the gloom of a long dead, nay, almost forgotten and abolished past. Where I stood the air was warm and comforting; the trees, just beginning to change color, were soft with greenish yellows and dusky reds; an old disused graveyard a little way below the house sent up its quota of appropriate melancholy to the scene, and I lingered a little while, supping, halfluxuriously as one sometimes does, upon that sense of all-pervading decay which, when it does not come home too pressingly to one's self and is not too intrusive in its moralizing, is rarely without charm. That there were deeper chords than such mild moralizings to be touched in connection with this scene I was, however, aware, though my impressions as to what those chords were had grown not a little vague and blurred; and this sense of an exceptional gloom and tragedy was naturally deepened by the tale told at my request in ampler detail than I had before heard it, by my hosts the same evening over the dinner table. I will take it up for

the reader's benefit at what may be called its most dramatic moment, thereby sparing him those preliminaries which are apt to be the bore of such recitals.

Lord Ballybrophy was dreadfully disturbed! He was standing beside the sundial which formed a central ornament of his deer-park, looking down a long bracken glade, on one side of which lay a small triangular-shaped wood, across which the sun was just then shaking its last rays. He had dined, for it was al· ready seven o'clock, and four was the fashionable dinner-hour a century ago in Ireland. He had dined liberally, with that leisurely discrimination so important for digestion, and had strolled forth to enjoy an hour's saunter over the grass previous to settling down for the night to cards. All this was customary and as it ought to be, and yet his mind was most unaccustomarily disturbed, and the cause of that disturbance is what you are about to be informed.

It was a year when a good many minds in Ireland were disturbed-the still unforgotten year of 'Ninety-eight. For months the whole country had been tinging, first with alarms, then with the actual details of Rebellion in all its horrors. It was not that any pains had been spared by the Executive of the day to hinder the misguided island from rushing upon its destruction. For months past an indefatigable soldiery had been allowed full discretion, and in their zeal for the cause of loyalty had spared no means, however painful to their own feelings, to coerce recusants into the paths of order. The Commander-in-Chief was a man known to entertain the largest and most liberal ideas in this respect, and as such to be fully worthy of the confidence reposed in him by his superiors in England. At the time. of which this story treats, the first scenes of the rising were already over, but the fire still in places burned fiercely, and that same system of energetic and not always too fantastically discriminating discipline was still held to be absolutely indispensable.

These larger public matters were not what at that moment were chiefly disturbing Lord Ballybrophy's mind. It was a smaller and more personal one. Throughout his youth and early manhood his most intimate friend and ally had been

Eustace Kennedy, son and heir of the owner of the neighboring property of Mount Kennedy, whose entrance gate stood, as we know, nearly opposite to the Ballybrophy one. The two young men had been at College together; had stood by one another in not a few duels; had seen together the bottom of more bowls of punch than it would be possible at this hour to enumerate; and when upon his father's death Lord Ballybrophy had succeeded to the family estates, it had been an added satisfaction in the lot to which a kind Providence had called him that his friend Eustace, whose father was also dead, would be his nearest neighbor, and would be able no doubt to support him in carrying out not a few local reforms upon which his own energetic mind was already actively engaged.

But alas for these anticipations! "Constancy lives in realms above, and life is thorny, and youth is vain," and before many years had gone over their heads, the two men had quarrelled bitterly, and the cause of this quarrel had been no other than that wretched little piece of triangular-shaped woodland, at which Lord Ballybrophy was at this moment gazing! To begin with, it was a "Naboth's vineyard," a fragment of the smaller property which had got enclosed as happens sometimes, in Ireland as elsewhere, in the larger one. Lord Ballybrophy would willingly have purchased it at many times its value. Eustace Kennedy, who was always more or less in want of money, would probably as willingly have sold it. Unfortunately it was impossible. A strict entail barred him from doing so, added to which at the farther end of the wood, and actually touching it, lay a graveyard, still used by the Kennedy family, and as such inalienable.

It was not the mere fact of the existence of this Naboth's vineyard so much as certain circumstances which arose out of its ownership which had caused the breach. Lord Ballybrophy, as already hinted, was a man of strict principles; a disciplinarian; one to whom the belief in a natural hierarchy was almost a matter of religion; an intense believer in the inherent difference between-let us say pewter and silver -and the duty, nay, obligation of the latter in all things to direct, control, and if necessary coerce the former. Now upon all these points Eustace Kennedy was de