came within the first decade after Italian opera had its introduction.

Concerning another's recollections, I have not the slightest doubt.
Within the last year Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, entertaining some of her
relatives and friends with an account of social doings in New York in
her childhood, recalled the fact that she had been taken as a tiny miss
to hear some of the performances of the Garcia Troupe, and, if I mistake
not, had had Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart's "Nozze di
Figaro" and "Don Giovanni" pointed out to her by her brother. This
brother was Samuel Ward, who enjoyed the friendship of the old poet,
and published recollections of him not long after his death, in The
New York Mirror. For a score of years I have enjoyed the gentle
companionship at the opera of two sisters whose mother was an Italian
pupil of Da Ponte's, and when, a few years ago, Professor Marchesan, of
the University of Treviso, Italy, appealed to me for material to be used
in the biography of Da Ponte, which he was writing, I was able, through
my gracious and gentle operatic neighbors, to provide him with a number
of occasional poems written, in the manner of a century ago, to their
mother, in whom Da Ponte had awakened a love for the Italian language
and literature. This, together with some of my own labors in uncovering
the American history of Mozart's collaborator, has made me feel
sometimes as if I, too, had dwelt for a brief space in that Arcadia of
which I purpose to gossip in this chapter, and a few others which are
to follow it.

There may be other memories going back as far as Mrs. Howe's, but I
very much doubt if there is another as lively as hers on any question
connected with social life in New York fourscore years ago. Italian
opera was quite as aristocratic when it made its American bow as it
is now, and decidedly more exclusive. It is natural that memories of