`And why couldn't he have a voice too?' asked Freddy Malins sharply. `Is it because he's only a black?'

Nobody answered this question and Mary Jane led the table back to the legitimate opera. One of her pupils had given her a pass for Mignon. Of course it was very fine, she said, but it made her think of poor Georgina Burns. Mr Browne could go back farther still, to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin — Tietjens, Ilma de Murzka, Campanini, the great Trebelli, Giuglini, Ravelli, Aramburo. Those were the days, he said, when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin. He told too of how the top gallery of the old Royal used to be packed night after night, of how one night an Italian tenor had sung five encores to Let me like a Soldier fall', introducing a high C every time, and of how the gallery boys would sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great prima donna and pull her themselves through the streets to her hotel. Why did they never play the grand old operas now, he asked, Dinorah, Lucrezia Borgia? Because they could not get the voices to sing them: that was why.

`O, well,' said Mr Bartell D'Arcy, `I presume there are as good singers today as there were then.'

`Where are they?' asked Mr Browne defiantly.

`In London, Paris, Milan,' said Mr Bartell D'Arcy warmly. `I suppose Caruso, for example, is quite as good, if not better than any of the men you have mentioned.'

`Maybe so,' said Mr Browne. `But I may tell you I doubt it strongly.'

`O, I'd give anything to hear Caruso sing,' said Mary Jane.

`For me,' said Aunt Kate, who had been picking a bone, `there was only one tenor. To please me, I mean. But I suppose none of you ever heard of him.'

`Who was he, Miss Morkan?' asked Mr Bartell D'Arcy politely.

`His name,' said Aunt Kate, `was Parkinson. I heard him when he was in his prime and I think he had then the purest tenor voice that was ever put into a man's throat.'