This sort of “audience” lasted, at Miss Lind’s rooms, _all day_. To use her own expression, she was “torn in pieces”—and it was by those whom nothing would keep out. A police force would have protected her, but, while she habitually declined the calls and attentions of fashionable society, she was in constant dread of driving more humble claimants from her door. She submitted, _every day_, to the visits of strangers, as far as strength, and her professional duties, would any way endure—but, as her stay in a place drew to a close, the pressure became so pertinacious and overwhelming as to exceed what may be borne by human powers of attention, human spirits and human nerves. Her imperfect acquaintance with our language, of course, very materially increased the fatigue—few people speaking simply and distinctly enough for a foreigner, and the annoyance of answering half-understood remarks from strangers, or of requesting from them a repetition of a question, being a nervous exercise, for six or eight hours together, which the reader will easily allow to be “trying.”
But—though we have thus explained how there were excuse enough for ever so monosyllabic a reception of introductions, by Jenny Lind, that evening—our own impression of her address and manners was very different from that of the gay Baron. Let us tell, in turn, what _we_ saw, though our discourse is getting long, and though our rule is never to put private society into print except as hominy comes to market—the kernel of the matter, with no clue to the stalk that bore it, or the _field_ in which it grew.
The party was at a most lovely villa, ten miles from town on the bank of the Hudson, and the invitations were to an “At Home, at five P. M.” We were somewhat late, and were told, on reaching the drawing-room, that Jenny Lind had just danced in a quadrille, and was receiving introductions in a deep alcove of one of the many apartments opening from the hall. The band was playing delightfully in a central passage from which the principal rooms radiated; and, while the dance was still going on beyond, and the guests were rambling about in the labyrinths of apartments crowded with statuary, pictures, and exotic trees laden with fruits and flowers, there was a smaller crowd continually renewed at the entrance of the alcove which caged the beloved Nightingale.