bettered his fortunes a trifle in Boston and Philadelphia, but failed
again in New Orleans and St. Louis. Then he went to San Francisco,
where the fact that Mme. Nevada was a native of the Pacific Slope was
a helpful factor. After the close of the season at the Metropolitan
Opera House he gave a "spring season" of six performances in one week,
beginning on April 20th. He repeated the performance in Boston and then
sailed for Europe, stopping in New York only long enough to institute
two suits at law--one against Signor Nicolini to recover $10,000 for
failing to sing, and one against Mme. Nevada for $3,000, alleged to
have been overpaid her. The suits, in all likelihood, were merely moves
in the managerial game which he was playing in London and New York. In
the seventh of these "Chapters of Opera" I described as the crowning
achievement of Colonel Mapleson in the season full of noteworthy
incidents the circumstance that he had succeeded in owing Mme. Patti
some $5,000 or $6,000. Nicolini was Patti's husband.

More than ever it looked in the spring of 1885 as if Italian opera had
received its quietus. The demoralization of the Academy of Music was
complete. In London there prevailed a state of affairs so anomalous and
startling that the newspaper critics were cudgeling their brains in a
vain effort to find an explanation. For the first time in one hundred
and fifty-eight years the British metropolis was without opera; for
the first time in thirty-nine years (except in 1856, when fire made it
impossible) the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden had failed to open
its doors on Easter Tuesday. Mr. Gye and his backers refused to venture
their fortunes again, and the lease of Her Majesty's was also going
begging. In New York Colonel Mapleson had held one good card which he
did not seem to know how to play: the season compassed the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the operatic début of Mme. Patti. There ought, for
excellent and obvious reasons, to have been a fitting celebration of