A man whose name I never learned dropped a big, fragrant bunch of violets at my feet each night for weeks. Becoming discouraged after a while because I did not seek him out in his gallery seat, he sent me a note begging for a glance and adding, for identification, this illuminating point: "You'll know me by my boots hanging over!"

Who could disregard such an appeal? That night my eyes searched the balconies feverishly. He had not vainly raised my hopes; his boots were hanging over, large boots, that looked as if they had seen considerable service. I sang my best to those boots and—dear man!—the violets fell as sweetly as before. I have conjured up a charming portrait of this individual, with a soul high enough to love music and violets and simple enough not to be ashamed of his boots. Would that all "sincere admirers" might be of such an ingenuous and engaging a pattern.

The variety of "admirers" that are the lot of a person on the stage is extraordinary. It is very difficult for the stage persons themselves to understand it. It has never seemed to me that actors as a class are particularly interesting. Personally I have always been too cognisant of the personalities behind the scenes to ever have any theatrical idols; but to a great many there is something absolutely fascinating about the stage and stage folk. The actor appears to the audience in a perpetual, hazy, calcium glory. We are, one and all, children with an inherent love for fairy tales and it is probably this love which is in a great measure accountable for the blind adoration received by most stage people.

I have received, I imagine, the usual number of letters from "your sincere admirer," some of them funny and some of them rather pathetic. Very few of them were really impertinent or offensive. In nearly all was to be found the same touching devotion to an abstract ideal for which, for the moment, I chanced to be cast. Once in a while there was some one who, like a person who signed himself "Faust," insisted that I had "met his eyes" and "encouraged him from afar." Needless to say I had never in my life seen him; but he worked himself into quite a fever of resentment on the subject and wrote me several letters. There was also a man who wrote me several perfectly respectful, but ardent, love letters to which, naturally, I did not respond. Then, finally, he bombarded me with another type of screed of which the following is a specimen:

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, say something,—if it is only to rate me for my importunities or to tell me to go about my business! Anything but this contemptuous silence!"

But these were exceptions. Most of my "admirers'" letters are gems of either humour or of sentiment. Among my treasures is an epistle that begins:

Isn't this a masterpiece?

There was also an absurdly conceited man who wrote me one letter a year for several years, always in the same vein. He was evidently a very pious youth and had "gotten religion" rather badly, for in every epistle he broke into exhortation and urged me fervently to become a "real Christian," painting for me the joys of true religion if I once could manage to "find it." In one of his later letters—after assuring me that he had prayed for me night and morning for three years and would continue to do so—he ended in this impressive manner:

Could anything be more entertaining than this naÏve fashion of making a date in Heaven?

Not all my letters were love letters. Sometimes I would receive a few words from some woman unknown to me but full of a sweet and understanding friendliness. Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton, then the centre of the stage scandal through her friendship with Henry Ward Beecher, wrote me a charming letter that ended with what struck me as a very pathetic touch:

I never knew Mrs. Tilton personally, but have often felt that I should have liked her. One of the dearest communications I ever received was from a French working girl, a corset maker, I believe. She wrote:

One of the favourite jests of the critics was my obduracy in matters of sentiment. It was said that I would always have emotional limitations because I had no love affairs like other prime donne. Once, when I gave some advice to a young girl to "keep your eyes fixed upon your artistic future," or some such similar phrase, the press had a good deal of fun at my expense. "That" it was declared, "was exactly what was the matter with Clara Louise; she kept her eyes fixed upon an artistic future instead of upon some man who was in love with her!" I was rather a good shot, very fond of target shooting, and many jokes were also made on the supposed damage I did. One newspaper man put it rather more aptly. "Not only in pistol shooting," he said, "but in everything she aims at, our prima donna is sure to hit the mark."

My "sincere admirers" were from all parts of the house, but I think I found the "gallery" ones most sincere and, certainly, the most amusing. Max Maretzek used to say that he had no manner of use for an artist unless she could fill the family circle. I am glad to be able to record that I always could. My singing usually appealed to the people. The Police Gazette always gave me good notices! I love the family circle. As a rule the appreciation there is greater because of the sacrifices which they have had to make to buy their seats. When people can go to hear good music every night, they do not care nearly so much about doing it.

I wonder if anybody besides singers get such an extraordinary sense of contact and connection with members of their audiences? I have sometimes felt as if thought waves, reaching through the space between, held me fast to some of those who heard me sing. Who knows what sympathies, what comprehensions, what exquisite friendships, were blossoming out there in the dark house like a garden, waiting to be gathered? Letters—not necessarily love letters—rather, stray messages of appreciation and understanding—have brought me a similar sense of joy and of safe intimacy. After the receipt of any such, I have sung with the pleasant sense that a new friend—yes, friend, not auditor—was listening. I have suddenly felt at home in the big theatre; and often, very often, have I looked eagerly over the banked hosts of faces, asking myself wistfully which were the strangers and which mine own people.

It was not only in the theatre that I found "admirers." My vacations were beset with those who wanted to look at and speak to a genuine prima donna at close range. Indeed, I had frequently to protect myself from perfectly strange and intrusive people. Often I have gone to Saratoga during the season. Saratoga was a fashionable resort in those days and I always had a good audience. One incident that I remember of Saratoga was a detestable train that invariably came along in the middle of my performance—the evening train from New York. I always had to stop whatever I was singing and wait for it to go by. One night I thought I would cheat it and timed my song a little earlier so that I would be through before the train arrived. It just beat me by a bar; and I could hear it steaming nearer and nearing as I hurried on. As I came to the end there was a loud whistle from the locomotive;—but, for once, luck was on my side, for it was pitched in harmony with my final note! The coincidence was warmly applauded.

When on the road I not infrequently practised with my banjo at hotels. It was more practicable to carry about than a piano and, besides, it was not always an easy matter to hire a good piano. One time—also in Saratoga—I was playing that instrument preparatory to beginning my morning practice, when an old gentleman who had a room on the same floor, descended to the office in a fine temper. He was a long, slim, wiry old fellow, with a high, black satin stock about his bony neck, very few hairs on his little round head, deep sunken eyes, pinched features, and an extremely nervous manner.

"See here," he burst out in a cracked voice, as he danced about on the marble tiling of the office floor, "have you a band of nigger minstrels in the house, eh! Zounds, sir, there's an infernal banjo tum, tum, tumming in my ears every morning and I can't sleep. Drat banjoes—I hate 'em. And nigger minstrels—I hate 'em too. You must move me, sir, move me at once. That banjo'll set me crazy. Move me at once, d'ye hear?—or I'll leave the house!"

"Why, sir," said the clerk suavely, "that banjo player is not a nigger minstrel, at all, sir, but Miss Clara Louise Kellogg, who uses a banjo to practise with."

The hard lines in the old fellow's face relaxed, he looked sharply at the clerk and, leaning over the counter, remarked:

"What, Clara Louise Kellogg! W—why, I'll go up and listen! Zounds, man, she's my particular favourite. She's charmed me with her sweet voice many a time. D—— n it, give her another banjo! Tell her to play all day if she wants to! Clara Louise Kellogg, eh? H'm, well, well!"

He tottered off and, as I observed, after that so long as I stayed left the door of his room open down the hall so that he could hear my "tum, tum, tumming."

A very different, though equally ingenuous tribute to my powers was that given by an old Indian trapper who, when in Chicago to sell his hides, went to hear me sing and expressed his emotions to a newspaper man of that city in approximately the following language:

Surely among my friends, if not among my "sincere admirers," I may include Okakura, who came over here with the late John La Farge as an envoy from the Japanese Government to study the art of this country as well as that of Europe. His dream was to found some sort of institution in Japan for the preservation and development of his country's old, national ideals in art. His criticisms of Raphael and Titian, by the way, were something extraordinary. As for music, he had a marvellous sense for it. La Farge took him to a Thomas Concert and he was vastly impressed by the music of Beethoven. One might have thought that he had listened to Occidental classics all his life. But, for that matter, I know two little Japanese airs that Davidson of London told me might well have been written by Beethoven himself; so it may be that there is an obscure bond of sympathy, which our less acute ears would not always recognise, between our great master and the composers of Okakura's native land.

Okakura was only twenty-six when I first met him at Richard Watson Gilder's studio in New York, but he was already a professor and spoke perfect English and knew all our best literature. When Munkacsy, the Hungarian painter, came over, his colleague, Francis Korbay, the musician, gave him an evening reception, and I took my Japanese friend. It was a charming evening and Okakura was the success of the reception. When he started being introduced he was nothing but a professor. Before he had gone the rounds he had become an Asiatic prince and millionaire. He had the "grand manner" and wore gorgeous clothes on formal occasions.

Some years later I called on his wife in Tokio. I considered this was the polite thing for me to do although Okakura himself was in Osaka at the time. Okakura had an art school in Tokio, kept up with the aid of the Government, where he was trying to fulfil his old ambition of preserving the individuality of his own people's work and of driving out Occidental encroachments. At the school, where we had gone with a guide who could serve also as interpreter, I asked for Madame. My request to see her was met with consternation. I was asking a great deal—how much, I did not realise until afterwards. Before I could enter, I was requested to take off my shoes. This I considered impossible as I was wearing high-laced boots. Furthermore, we were having winter weather, very cold and raw, and nothing was offered me to put on in their place, as the Japanese custom is at the entrances of the temples. My refusal to remove my shoes halted proceedings for a while; but, eventually, I was led around to a side porch where I could sit on a chair (I was amazed at their having such a thing) and speak with the occupants of the house as they knelt inside on their heels. The shoji, or bamboo and paper screen, was pushed back, revealing an interior wonderfully clever in its simplicity. The furniture consisted of a beautiful brassier and two rare kakamonos on the wall—nothing more.

In came Madame Okakura in a grey kimono and bare feet. Down she went on her knees and saluted me in the prettiest fashion imaginable. We talked through the interpreter until her daughter entered, who spoke to me in bad, limited French. The daughter was an unattractive girl, with an artificially reddened mouth, but I thought the mother charming, like a most exquisite Parisienne masquerading as a "Japanese Lady."

Not long after my visit I saw Okakura himself and told him how much I had enjoyed seeing his wife. He gave me an annoyed glance and remained silent. I was nonplussed and somewhat mortified. I could not understand what could be the trouble, for he acted as if his honour were offended. In time I learned that the unpardonable breach of good form in Japan was to mention his wife to a Japanese!

So graceful, so delicate in both expression and feeling are the letters that I have received from Okakura, that I cannot resist my inclination to include them in this chapter,—although, possibly, they are somewhat too personal. On January 4, 1887, he wrote:

And so I come to one of all these who was really a "sincere admirer," and a faithful lover, although I never knew him. It is a difficult incident to write of, for I feel that it holds some of the deepest elements of sentiment and of tragedy with which I ever came in touch.

I was singing in Boston when a man sent me a message saying that he was connected with a newspaper and had something of great importance about which he wanted to see me. He furthermore said that he wished to see me alone. It was an extraordinary request and, at first, I refused. I suspected a subterfuge—a wager, or something humiliating of that sort. But he persisted, sending yet another message to the effect that he had something to communicate to me which was of an essentially personal nature. Finally I consented to grant him the interview and, as he had requested, I saw him alone.

He was just back from the front where he had been war correspondent during the heart of the Civil War, and he told me that he had a letter to give to me from a soldier in his division who had been shot. The soldier was mortally wounded when the reporter found him. He was lying at the foot of a tree at the point of death, and the correspondent asked if he could take any last messages for him to friends or relatives. The soldier asked him to write down a message to take to a woman whom he had loved for four years, but who did not know of his love.

"Tell her," he said, speaking with great difficulty, "that I would not try even to meet her; but that I have loved her, before God, as well as any man ever loved a woman." He asked the reporter to feel inside his uniform for the woman's picture. "It is Miss Kellogg," he added, just before he died. "You—don't think that she will be offended if I send her this message—now—do you?"

He asked the correspondent to draw his sabre and cut off a lock of hair to send to me, and the reporter wrote down the message on the only scraps of paper at his disposal—torn bits scribbled over with reports of the enemy's movements, and the names of other dead soldiers whose people must be notified when the battle was over. And then the soldier—my soldier—died; and the correspondent left him the picture and came away.

The scribbled message and the lock of hair he put into my hands, saying:

"He was very much worried lest you would think him presumptuous. I told him that I was sure you would not."

I was weeping as he spoke, and so he left me.