"But what did she say when she saw you, for you were her first inspiration?" He answered: "I was her first inspiration." His echo of my words annoyed me. Was the poor chap mentally too feeble to appreciate the triumph of his daughter? I persisted in my question:

"Wasn't she glad to see you?" He stopped under the light of a lamp and looked at me slightly bewildered. Then he spoke in explicit accents.

"No, she wasn't glad. I went in after her first aria, which Madame Miramelli, God rest her soul"-he piously crossed himself-taught her, and

"Well-well?" I impatiently inter

posed.

"Well, she didn't know me, that's all." His voice trailed off into a ghostly whisper. I became indignant. Such abominable lack of gratitude.

"I tell you the truth," he reiterated, "she had forgotten me, my face, my name, and, as she never knew I was her father" He paused. I whistled my rage and incredulity to the heavens.

"Much must have happened to her in ten years. She forgot. She forgot-she is not to blame, only she forgot me " He moved slowly down Broadway, this débris of a great artist, this forgotten father of a famous singer with a convenient memory. Later I wrote a glowing critical notice for my newspaper about his daughter, The Zelocca, which bristled with technical terms and was bejewelled with adjectives. Was she not a successor to Carlotta Patti?

IV

To go or not to go? I argued the case for hours before I finally decided to accept the prettily worded invitation of La Zelocca to visit her some afternoon, or, to be precise, the afternoon following the arrival of her note. I dislike informal little calls on prima donnas at hotels, where you usually find a chain of adorers, musical managers, press-agents, and anonymous parasites. Nevertheless, I went up to the Plaza, the Lord only knows why. Perhaps my curiosity, now aflame, would be gratified; perhaps the young woman would make an excuse for her cold-blooded behavior to her abandoned father. Who knows? Some such idea was in my

mind when-after the pompous preluding of my presence I knocked at the door of her suite in the hotel. She was sitting in a comfortable chair and gazing out upon the still, green park. I begged of her not to derange herself as she made a feint of rising, and saluted her with the conventional kiss on the hand-I'm bound to acknowledge a finely articulated, wellkept hand-and in return was warmly welcomed. Close by Zelocca was handsomer than on the stage. Her robust figure was draped in a well-fitting street costume and her shapely head had evidently been treated by a discriminating hairdresser. We conversed of the weather, of the newspaper criticisms (mine in particular!), and I went so far as to ask her about the box-office. Yes, it had pleased her; better, had pleased her manager-a jewel of a man, be it understood. She spoke in a silvery voice and with the cool assurance of a woman who fully realized her financial worth. We drank tea served in Russian fashion. I saw my opening.

"So you were in Russia before taking the Western world by storm."

"Ah, yes, cher maître" (I bristled with importance; I always do when I am thus addressed), "I studied hard in Saint Petersburg." (It was not yet Petrograd.) "And I benefited by my intimacy with the great Zelocca." I was puzzled. She quickly added: "I am a relative of hers. I took her name by her kind permission. My mother gave me a letter to her when I left New York. She was a friend-an early friend of my mother's husband."

Her mother! I thought, who the dickens is her mother? My face must have betrayed me, for she looked at me pensively (her eyes were truly glorious in their deceptive frankness) and murmured:

"Of course, M. Mario must have told you of my mother's death." I understood. She meant old Miramelli-Mario, and should have said stepmother. I nodded as sympathetically as I could (music critics are sometimes greater actors than the opera-singers they criticise) and replied:

But

"Ah, yes. M. Mario told me. you say Zelocca still lives. He said to me, if I remember, that she was dead years ago." She seemed startled.

"He told you that- Ah! the miserable-" I jumped at my chance.

mother was a she-devil." This sounded like the daughter of Mario. "She treated me as if I were a kitchen-maid." The dramatic manner with which this speech was delivered left me no doubt as to its sincerity. I was again at sea. She poured a torrent of words into my ears. "My father, my father, that old drunken beast, my father! Ah! if you only knew the truth. How an artiste must suffer before she drags herself out of the mire. It was a vile swamp that home of mine on -on- She paused for the name.

"On Irving Place," I interposed. "Yes, on Irving Place. That Mario was not my father, he was only the husband of madame-and she-she was, I'm ashamed to say it, my true mother.'

La bella Zelocca covered her face with

passe had I reached. She continued, her face still hidden:

"A cruel, unnatural mother, a still crueller stepfather... he never ceased his persecutions . . . and I was too young, too timid, too much in fear of my jealous mother-who soon found out what was going on. That's why she was so disagreeable the day you called. She soon got rid of me I was packed off to Russia to her sister. Oh! didn't I tell you that the other Zelocca is my aunt? No! She is; but kinder than my mother. Now you know why I wouldn't see the old rascal

who expected to live on me as he lived on the bounty of two sisters-why--”

But I felt that my presence was becoming indecorous in this close atmosphere of family scandal. I stood up and took

my hat. She sat bolt upright, stiff as a votive candle. Her expression was one of annoyed astonishment.

"Surely you're not going so soon, and not going without saying a word of sympathy? You, I felt, were one of my oldest and truest friends"-at these doleful words my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth from sheer terror-"and to whom should I appeal but to you!" I wriggled, but saw no way of escape. Then I burst out:

"In God's name, madame, what can I say, what can I do for you? This is the third time I've seen you in my life. I only knew Mario-that venerable scamp -superficially. Your mother-heavens! -your mother I've seen often enoughtoo often-" She beamed on me and became so excited that she, too, got on her feet, the while supporting herself with a gold-topped stick.

"Ah," she triumphantly cried. "I knew it, I knew it. You are the man I thought you were. You hated my mother. You despise her husband and you will, I'm sure, help me in my search, my search

The room began to spin slowly around and the grand pianoforte seemed to tilt my way. Perhaps Zelocca saw the hunted look in my eyes, a man as well as a music critic at bay, for she suddenly exploded the question: "You will look for him, find him, bring him to me?" I wavered toward the door, fearing heat apoplexy, yet I contrived to stammer: "Find-find-who shall I find for

you?"

"My real father," she fairly chanted,

and her face was as the shining face of an ardent neophyte at some tremendously mystical ceremony. I vow as I left the room-on a dead run-that an aureole was foaming about her lovely head. I didn't stop sprinting till I reached the ground floor, ran across Fifty-ninth Street into the park, and, finally, at the Casino I threw myself into a seat and called foroh, it wasn't water! After such a display of drab family linen one doesn't drink water. Any experienced social washerwoman will tell you that. By Jove! I was positively nervous with their crazyquilt relationships. I pondered the situation. Was Zelocca an artistic liar, a wonderful actress, or simply a warmhearted and too enthusiastic woman in search of a father? I couldn't make up my mind. I haven't yet. She may have suspected that my critical notice of her second concert might not be as fervid as the first on account of Mario's tale about her cruelty. I've known singers to tell worse lies for a smaller reason. But she had won her public, and press, too; her forthcoming appearance was bound to be a repetition of the première as far as success went. No, I give it up. I knew I'd go to all of her concerts and write sweet words of her distinguished art. I did. (Later she married her manager and lived unhappily ever afterward.) I'm beginning to regret now that I left her so hurriedly that afternoon. Perhaps she might have given me a clew. What a liar! Or a crazy woman? Her father-I'm beginning to believe that her father was M. Mario, the husband of madame, and that her aunt-oh, hang her Russian aunt!

I

UT of the flotsam and jetsam which the dark tides of Time deposit on the shallow shores of Memory, I clutch at the vision of a goodly company gathered in the private dining-room of the Savile when Gosse invited a group of his friends to do honor to Howells. Of our fellow guests I can recall with certainty only Thomas Woolner, the sculptor-poet, Austin Dobson, George Du Maurier, Thomas Hardy, and William Black. And I can rescue only two fleeting fragments of the talk. The first was a discussion of the reasons for the disappearance of revenge as a motive in fiction-a discussion which resulted in a general agreement that as men no longer sit up nights on purpose to hate other men, the novelists have been forced to discard that murderous desire to get even which had been a mainspring of romance in less sophisticated centuries.

Over the second topic there could be no general agreement, since it was a definition of the image called up in our several minds by the word forest. Until that evening I had never thought of forest as clothing itself in different colors and taking on different forms in the eyes of different men; but I then discovered that even the most innocent word may don strange disguises. To Hardy forest suggested the sturdy oaks to be assaulted by the woodlanders of Wessex; and to Du Maurier it evoked the trim and tidy avenues of the national domain of France. To Black the word naturally brought to mind the low scrub of the so-called deerforests of Scotland; and to Gosse it summoned up a view of the green-clad mountains that towered up from the Scandinavian fiords. To Howells forest recalled the thick woods that in his youth fringed the rivers of Ohio; and to me there came

back swiftly the memory of the wild growths, bristling up unrestrained by man, in the Chippewa Reservation which I had crossed fourteen years before in my canoe trip from Lake Superior to the Mississippi.

Simple as the word seemed, it was interpreted by each of us in accord with his previous personal experience. And these divergent experiences exchanged that evening brought home to me as never before the inherent and inevitable inadequacy of the vocabulary of every language, since there must always be two partners in any communication by means of words, and the verbal currency passing from one to the other has no fixed value necessarily the same to both of them.

II

Ar the end of September, 1883, I received a note from Walter Pollock, telling me that the editor of the Saturday Review had resigned and that he was thereafter to be in charge of the paper; and he wanted me to become a contributor to its columns. I accepted the invitation, and during the eleven years of Pollock's editorship I wrote frequently for the Saturday, most frequently when I was in London for the summer but also occasionally when I was at home in New York, reviewing American books and criticising the plays performed in the New York theatres. My first article gave an account of the visits of various British actors to the United States; a topic timely in the fall of 1883, when Henry Irving was about to come to America for the first time.

The Saturday Review was then the property of its founder, A. J. B. Beresford-Hope; and Pollock was the third editor in its less than thirty years of life. Its editorial office was in the Albany, where it occupied G. 1., a little set of

rooms on the ground floor, looking out on Vigo Street. The tradition of mystery still lingered in its management, and the contributors were supposed not to know one another; and when we visited the editor we were shown into one or another of the tiny rooms wherein we waited in solitude until the coast was clear for us to approach the editor without danger of meeting some other member of the staff in the short, dark hall. It seemed to me that this affectation of secrecy was a little absurd; especially did it seem so when I first attended one of the annual fish-dinners at Greenwich, which the proprietor was in the habit of giving every summer to all his contributors. I was present at two of these very agreeable gatherings, in June, 1885, and in July, 1886; and I think the second of these was the last occasion when the large body of Saturday Reviewers had the privilege of beholding themselves in mass.

I find that I have preserved not only the invitations and the bills of fare of these banquets but also one of the seating plans with the names of the guests, nearly threescore and ten; and I suppose that this is a list more or less complete of those who were then contributors to the London weekly which was still a power in British politics. I read the names of Mr. Arthur Balfour and of Mr. James Bryce, but I am inclined to believe that they had ceased to write before I began. The assistant editor was George Saintsbury; and among the most frequent writers were Lang, Dobson, Gosse, Wigan, H. D. Traill, David Hannay, William Hunt, Herbert Stephen, W. E. Henley, Richard Garnett and the editor's brother, the present Sir Frederick Pollock. E. A. Freeman had only recently withdrawn from the Saturday for political reasons, after having been an assiduous contributor for a quarter of a century; and his friend, John Richard Green, for years a most voluminous writer in its columns, had died in 1883. Although Green was primarily a historian he was also a very versatile man in his tastes, dashing off sparkling articles on social topics; and I was informed by one of his intimates that most of the somewhat sensational papers on the "Girl of the Period," which had enlivened the pages of the Saturday in the

late sixties were due to Green and not to Mrs. Lynn Lynton, who was generally credited with their authorship.

As I glance down the seating plan I am reminded that I sat between Wigan and W. R. Ralston, the leading British authority on Russian literature; and in the course of our conversation I referred to a review bearing his signature which I had read in the Academy and which praised a recent American book on the epic songs of Russia, and I added that I had been patriotically pleased to find equally laudatory comments on this volume in the Athenæum and in the Saturday. Ralston smilingly told me that he was responsible for those two anonymous reviews of this American book as well as for his signed article. "I did not want to write about it three times," he explained, "but I felt that I ought to do so, since there is nobody else here who takes any great interest in Russian literature. It was a good piece of work, that American book; and if I had refused to write those reviews it would have had to go without noticewhich did not seem to me quite fair to the author." It struck me then that it was fortunate for the author that Ralston had taken so favorable a view of the volume; but I also reflected that anonymous reviewing might readily put it in the power of a personal enemy to attack a writer from the ambush of half a dozen different journals.

The Saturday Review was not hospitable to outsiders; and I doubt if the editors even examined the voluntary offerings which might be sent in. The theory was that the paper had a sufficient, a complete, a regular staff, who had been invited and who had been tested by time. The editor had such confidence in his associates that he did not even read their articles until these came back to him from the printer in galley-proof. Of course, he had to arrange his table of contents for every number and to distribute his timely topics, so as to avert repetition and to secure variety. Generally I submitted the subject of any paper I proposed to prepare; but when I was three thousand miles away I sometimes went ahead and sent in my article without previous authorization. And I may confess frankly now that it was great fun for me, an