al tendencies. By the time I was ten I had visions of studying
abroad. At the age of twelve I had heard the music of almost the entire
grand opera repertoire. By the time I was sixteen I was studying in
Paris.

My earliest memories take me back to my home town, Melrose,
Massachusetts, a small but very attractive city not far from Boston. I
can recall a large room with an open fireplace and flames flashing from
a log fire into which I spent many hours gazing, trying to conjure up
strange and fanciful shapes and figures. From the fireplace, so my
mother tells me, I would stroll to the great, old-fashioned square piano
in the corner, and, standing on tiptoe, would strum upon the keys. I
suppose I was two or three years old at the time, yet it seems to me
that I was striving to give expression musically to the strange shapes
and figures suggested by the fire and by my vivid imagination.

[Illustration: A LITTLE GIRL IN MELROSE]

Hereditary influences must have helped to shape my musical career. My
mother and father both sang in the First Universalist Church of Melrose.
Mother's father, Dennis Barnes, of Melrose, had been a musician, and had
organized a little orchestra which played on special occasions. He gave
violin lessons and composed, and there is a tradition that in his
boyhood days he learned to play the violin from an Italian fiddler, and
afterward constructed his own instrument, pulling hairs from the tail of
an old white horse to make the bow.

My father, Sydney D. Farrar, owned a store in Melrose when I was born.
In the summer time he played baseball with a local amateur team with
such success that, when I was two years old, he was engaged by the
Philadelphia National League Baseball Club as first baseman. He was a
professional ball-player with the Philadelphia team for several years.
Yet during the winters he was always in Melrose, looking after business.
Both he and my mother were very fond of music, singing every week in the
church quartet and sometimes at concerts.

The house in which I was born is still standing, a large, old-fashioned
building on Mount Vernon Street, Melrose, which my father rented from
the Houghton estate. It is next door to the Blake house, a well-known
local landmark. Most of my early life was spent in this house, although
subsequently we moved twice to occupy other houses in the neighborhood.

My mother says that I was a happy baby, crooning and humming to myself,
singing when oth