I assisted with four thousand others at the first representation of the Magic Flute at the Grand Opera House, where the late James Fisk’s monogram is decently covered up by Gothic shields, hastily improvised after that distinguished actor met the reward of his crimes.  I heard lima di Murska for the first time.  She is an unpleasant miracle, compelling your reluctant astonishment.  Such vocal gymnastics I never heard.  The flute and the musical-box are left in the background, but her voice is nasal and disagreeable at first.  Lucca’s splendid, rich, full organ rang out gloriously by contrast, although her constitutional jealousy showed itself unpleasantly in some parts of the opera where Murska was so deliriously applauded.  Lucca, little woman, conquered herself at last, and handed the flowers up to her rival with a pretty grace which was loudly applauded.  It is strange that the tact of woman, usually so apprehensive, does not more often see the good effect of generosity.

One effect of the panic, it is to be hoped, will be to make the dinners less magnificently heavy.  I am sure every lady in New York who was last winter constrained to sit from seven o’clock until eleven at those monstrously elaborate and expensive dinners which have become so much the fashion, will be glad to dine in a more simple manner, in a shorter time, with less display, and with fewer courses, and fewer excitements.  One entertainer last winter introduced live swans and small canaries to enliven his dinner.  The swans splashed rather disagreeably.

“Do you know why he had the swans?” said a lady to a gentleman.

“I suppose, he wanted the Ledas of society,” said the gentleman.

“Well, yes,” said the lady, “but I did not know, although he is as rich as a Jew, that he was a Jupiter.”

The faces of the “panicstricken” seem to look brighter, although everybody talks of “shrinkage” and ruin.  Meanwhile the beautiful weather keeps the carriages going and Fifth Avenue looking gay.  “I shall fail, but my wife need not give up her horses,” said a young broker the other day.  The old days of commercial morality, when people reduced their style of living because they had failed, seem to have gone out of fashion.

A letter from New York, this Queen of Commerce, is almost necessarily mercantile, as is our conversation.

“How you all talk stocks and money!” said a gentleman just arrived from a ten years’ sojourn in Europe.  “When I went away you were talking of books, of art, of social ethics, of fine women, of good dinners, of whist and bezique:  now you are all talking of longs and shorts, bulls and bears, a fraction of per cent., etc. etc.—­all of you, men, women and children.”