delivered speech, and at that pause I was to speak instantly.  We got along remarkably well, for his soul was in his work, and I gave every spark of intelligence I had in me to the effort to satisfy him; so by the fifth or sixth performance we both felt less anxiety about the catching of our cues than we had at first.  On the night I speak of, some one on Salvini’s side of the stage greatly disturbed him by loud whispering in the entrance.  He was nervous and excitable, the annoyance (of which I was unconscious) threw him out of his stride, so to speak.  He glanced off warningly and snapped his fingers.  No use; on went the giggling and whispering.  At last, in the very middle of a speech, wrath overcame him.  He stopped dead.  That sudden stop was my cue.  Instantly I spoke.  Good heaven! he whirled upon me like a demon.  I understood that a mistake had been made, but it was not mine.  I knew my cue when I got it.  The humble Rosalia was forgotten.  With hot resentment my head went up and back with a fling, and I glared savagely back at him.  A moment we stood in silent rage.  Then his face softened, he laid the fingers of his left hand on his lips, extending his right with that unspeakably deprecating upturning of the palm known only to the foreign-born.  An informing glance of the eye toward the right, followed by a faint “Pardon!” was enough.  I dropped back to meek Rosalia, the scene was resumed, the cloud had passed.  But one man who had been looking on said:  “By Jove! you know, you two looked like a pair of blue-eyed devils, just ready to rend each other.  Talk about black-eyed rage; it’s the lightning of the blue eyes that sears every time.”

I had been quite wild to see Signor Salvini on his first visit to America, and at last I caught up with him in Chicago, and was so happy as to find my opportunity in an extra matinee.  The play was “Othello,” and during the first act he looked not only a veritable Moor, but, what was far greater, he seemed to be Shakespeare’s own “Moor of Venice.”  The splendid presence, the bluff, soldierly manner, the open, honest look, as the “round unvarnished tale” was delivered, made one understand, partly at least, how “that maiden never bold, a spirit so still and quiet,” had come at last to see “Othello’s visage in his mind, and to his honour and his valiant parts to consecrate her fortune and her soul!” Through all the noble scene, through all the soldierly dignity and candid speech, there was that tang of roughness that so naturally clung to the man whose life from his seventh year had been passed in the “tented field,” and who himself declared, “Rude am I in speech, and little bless’d with the set phrase of peace.”