AN AMERICAN TRILBY.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 7416, 13 July 1895, Page 6 (Supplement)

AN AMERICAN TRILBY.

Trilby has a living analogue. And she lives in New York. Some four or five years ago there was a model, well known in a certain clique of Gotham artists, who used to pose for head and hands and feet. Whether she posed for ' the altogether,' like her fascinating prototype, does not appear, but they still talk of the marvellous beauty of her extremities, moulded by no'prentice hand, but formed by nature's master workman.

She kept the studio stirred up continually by her funny tales of life in the section where she abided, tales where the wit and fun were a thin disguise for the pathos and misery below.. She was desperately poor, and had, moreover, a mother to support by her efforts. So day nfter day sho would trudge over from the other side of the city and sit for the ' knights of the brush,' taxing the brightest among them to keep pace with the flash of her repartee.

There was a Svengali in the story, too ; not an evil genius, however, with hypnotic powers, but a kindly old Belgian violinist, who lived away up under the eaves and amused himself playing accompaniments to the twittering sparrows. ( ne dny he heard a lark sing in the dirty old tenement, and set himself to find out where the songster lived. It was our pretty model singing, as she moved about her bare little room, and he made a bargain with her that she should come up to his attic in the evening, on her return from posing, and let him teach her how to use the grand voice nature had given her.

Ho night after night he taught her the notes, and the wonderful voice unfolded like a lovely rose, while the sparrows stopped their quarrelling to listen, hopping on the window-sill and cooking their impudent little heads sidewise to see. He trained her for four or five years and one day laid his head on his arms and cried because he could take her no further and the wonderful voice, the child of his heart, must languish unheard for lack of the touch of perfection.

But fortune smiled on this American Trilby, and one day someone heard her sing who took her to Europe and gave her the best that Paris has in vocal training. In the spring she is coming back, and New York will hear that voice, said to be one of the best America can boast, whose first song was heard under the eaves in a tenement.