Where Art Thou," to the complete satisfaction of her family and friends. She leaves the town for the city and an expensive teacher. From that moment her voice ceases to be a comfort and a luxury. It becomes a responsibility, a tyrant. Everything she eats, everywhere she goes, everything she wears, everything she does, must be eaten, gone, worn, and done with that voice in mind. She must turn it into a mere tool and hum her arpeggios and her scales and throw her tone forward with endless failures and endless repetitions and indiscernible progress. After a year of this excruciating self-criticism, someone tells her that her voice is not so good as it was.

And now she learns in what utter chaos vocal theories are; that more than half the teachers are ignorant and almost half are charlatans. The problem is, to find that needle in the haystack-the teacher that knows. The distraught girl goes to another instructor and then to another, feeling it necessary all the while to keep each former teacher from learning of her defection lest it hurt his feelings; for musicteaching is not conducted on business principles.

The new teacher may not be the right teacher, but be sure he has a radically different method from all his predecessors. He calls his system the "Old Italian Method," of course; they all do

ment and sensitiveness this battle is one of unutterable misery. She finds now that even to get a church-choir position, paying a paltry stipend of two or three hundred a year, the most disgusting wire-pulling, toadyism, and perseverance are necessary. She endures from parsimonious and unmusical choircommittees the treatment usually reserved for an intrusive book-agent; and if at last she gets a church she will soon be subscribing to the well-established

ural reaction, American managers) have against the American singer that has not had the seal of foreign approval. If she aspires to concert-work, she can pay a neat sum to a genial Semitic conducting a concert-bureau somewhere; and then she can wait till the engagements come. All she has to do is just to wait.

If she aspires to opera, and is of prepossessing appearance, and does not object to wearing tights, and the season is good, she can probably get an offer

The music-teacher of Paris is a surprising animal, too; lavish with praise till the pupil's advance payment is in, and then intolerably insolent, full of talk about art and very much down on all commercial vulgarity as practised by pork-packing Americans, and yet strangely grasping in every transaction. Once the girl, sick with deferred hope, has agonized her way to the completion of her course, if indeed her voice and health and hope and beauty have not succumbed to the malpractice of foreign

This début is sure to be in a provincial theatre, and it is ten to one that causes unavoidable or excusable will wreck the long-expected ovation, and she will find herself a failure or only a half-success. But grant her success, and she finds that critics are afraid to be rapturous over new genius. Managers do not compete for her, and she must make tour after tour at a small salary on a hard circuit. Once on the