"If anything could make a man forgive himself for being sixty years old," said the Consul, holding up his wine-glass between his eye and the setting sun,--for it was summer-time, "it would be that he can remember M. ---- in her divine sixteenity at the Park Theatre, thirty odd years ago. Egad, Sir, one couldn't help making great allowances for _Don Giovanni_, after seeing her in _Zerlina_. She was beyond imagination _piquante_ and delicious."
The Consul, as my readers may have partly inferred, was not a Roman Consul, nor yet a French one. He had had the honor of representing this great republic at one of the Hanse Towns,--I forget which,--in President Monroe's time. I don't recollect how long he held the office, but it was long enough to make the title stick to him for the rest of his life with the tenacity of a militia colonelcy or village diaconate. The country people round about used to call him "the _Counsel_" which, I believe,--for I am not very fresh from my school-books,--was etymologically correct enough, however orthoepically erroneous. He had not limited his European life, however, within the precinct of his Hanseatic consulship, but had dispersed himself very promiscuously over the Continent, and had seen many cities, and the manners of many men--and of some women,-- singing-women, I mean, in their public character; for the Consul, correct of life as of ear, never sought to undeify his divinities by pursuing them from the heaven of the stage to the purgatorial intermediacy of the _coulisses_, still less to the lower depth of disenchantment into which too many of them sunk in their private life.
"Yes, Sir," he went on, "I have seen and heard them all,--Catalani, Pasta, Pezzaroni, Grisi, and all the rest of them, even Sonntag,-- though not in her very best estate; but I give you my word there is none that has taken lodgings here," tapping his forehead, "so permanently as the Signorina G----, or that I can see and hear so distinctly, when I am in the mood of it, by myself. _Rosina, Desdemona, Cinderella_, and, as I said just now, _Zerlina_,--she is as fresh in them all to my mind's eye and ear, as if the Park Theatre had not given way to a cursed shoe-shop, and I had been hearing her there only last night. Let's drink her memory," the Consul added, half in mirth and half in melancholy,--a mood to which he was not unused, and which did not ill become him.