Heroisms

The other evening the San Carlo Opera Company was giving Carmen in the Boston Opera House. The orchestra was discoursing melodiously; on stage Alice Gentle as Carmen was making one of those swaggering exits characteristic of the part. She passed out over a bridge a number of feet above the stage. Suddenly there came a cracking--then a crackling. The bridge collapsed! The singer was thrown violently to the floor behind the scenery. Dazed, badly shaken, her hip painfully wrenched, she went back into the performance.

This sort of thing is characteristic of singers. Caruso in the midst of his fatal illness sang a performance in Brooklyn when he should have been in bed. Half way through he suffered a hemorrhage of the throat had to stop. His rashness helped him to the grave.