Itinerant singers went up and down the Mount [where the Cowper family lived], and all other streets, daily. The words they sang were almost always incoherent, but the melancholy wail they emitted droned on and on. Meanwhile, the singer’s head turned in all directions, scanning the houses to catch sight of a figure in a doorway, holding out a penny, or even a ha’penny. One singer was a very different type. She wouldn’t sing in the streets, but walked slowly down the back entries, and only on infrequent occasions. My brother Ernest, himself a keen music-lover with a fair knowledge of opera-music, was petrified one Saturday afternoon when this lovely, pure stream of song came into our kitchen, and the singer, in late middle age, apparently, acknowledged the few coppers given to her with grace and dignity […] [My brother discovered that] she had been a member of the Carl Rosa Opera Company until misfortune had overtaken her.