he: "Wake Holman's name shall come right after." And there it is.

III

I was very carefully and for those times not ignorantly taught in music.
Schell, his name was, and they called him "Professor." He lived over in
Georgetown, where he had organized a little group of Prussian refugees
into a German club, and from my tenth to my fifteenth year--at first
regularly, and then in a desultory way as I came back to Washington
City from my school in Philadelphia, he hammered Bach and Handel and
Mozart--nothing so modern as Mendelssohn--into my not unwilling nor
unreceptive mind, for my bent was in the beginning to compose dramas,
and in the end operas.

Adelina Patti was among my child companions. Once in the national
capital, when I was 12 years old and Adelina 9, we played together at
a charity concert. She had sung "The Last Rose of Summer," and I had
played her brother-in-law's variation upon "Home, Sweet Home." The
audience was enthusiastic. We were called out again and again. Then we
came on the stage together, and the applause increasing I sat down at
the keyboard and played an accompaniment with my own interpolations upon
"Old Folks At Home," which I had taught Adelina, and she sang the words.
Then they fairly took the roof off.

Once during a sojourn in Paris I was thrown with Christine Nilsson.
She was in the heyday of her success at the Theater Lyrique under the
patronage of Madame Miolan-Carvalho. One day I said to her: "The
time may come when you will be giving concerts." She was indignant.
"Nevertheless," I continued, "let me teach you a sure encore." I played
her Stephen Foster's immortal ditty. She was delighted. The sequel was
that it served her even a better turn than it had served Adelina Patti.

I played and transposed for the piano most of the melodies of Foster as
they were published, they being first produced in public by Christy's
Minstrels.

IV

Stephen Foster was the ne'er-do-well of a good Pennsylvania family. A
sister of his had married a brother of James Buchanan. There were two
daughters of this marriage, nieces of the President, and when they were
visiting the White House we had--shall I dare write it?--high jinks with
our nigger-minstrel concerts on the sly.

Will S. Hays, the rival of Foster as a song writer and one of my
reporters on the Courier-Journal, told me this story: "Foster," said he,
"was a good deal of what you might call a barroom loafer. He possessed a
sweet