properly was not wholly insensible.  With commendable candor she told young Wetherell that she had certain high ambitions or duties which she was determined to follow at the sacrifice of every selfish consideration; if he were willing to wait for her until she saw her way clear to the accomplishment of those duties, she would then link her destiny indissolubly with his.  To this the young druggist acceded.

In 1877 Emma was enabled to go to Paris to perfect her music studies.  Certain wealthy members of Dr. Bellow’s church provided her with the financial means, which she accepted as a loan, to be paid in due season.  In chapter four of the memoirs we are regaled with an instructive record of Emma’s voyage across the Atlantic, her admiration of the magnitude of the ocean, her consciousness of man’s utter helplessness should storms arise and drive the ship upon hidden rocks, etc., etc.  In the next chapter she laments the exceeding depravity of Paris, and expresses wonderment that in so fair a city humanity should abandon itself to such godless and damnable practices.  These things we refer to because they show the serious, not to say pious, trend of the young woman’s mind.  In one place she says:  “I thank God that my Eugene is tending a drug-store in Brooklyn instead of being surrounded by the divers temptations of this modern Babylon; for, circumspect and pure though he may be by nature, hardly could he be environed by all this wretchedness without receiving some taint therein.”

While she was in Paris she became acquainted with the great Gounod and with the brilliant but erratic Offenbach.  Gounod introduced her to many of the greatest composers and singers.  Among her friendliest acquaintances she numbered Wagner and Liszt.  The latter wrote her a sonata to sing, and Wagner tried to get her permission for him to introduce her into the trilogy he was then at work upon.  Meissonier made an exquisite study of her, and the younger Dumas made her the heroine of one of his brightest comedies, “La Petite Americaine.”  There was one man, however, whom our heroine would not suffer to be introduced to her; that man was Zola.  She would never recognize in her list of acquaintances, so she told Gounod with an angry stamp of her tiny foot, any man who debased his God-given talents to smut and lubricity.

In 1879 Miss Abbott returned to her native land, fully prepared to engage in the profession of a public singer.  Her first tour of the country was a continuous round of ovations.  The public hailed her as the queen of American song; the press was generous in its appreciation.  The next year she embarked in opera.  This cost her a season of severe self-struggle.  She dreaded to expose herself to the temptations of the stage.  In her memoirs she assures us with all gravity that she prayed long and earnestly for courage to put on and wear the short dress required in the performance