s was fourteen, and Theodore was not quite sixteen,
a tremendous thing happened. Schabelitz, the famous violinist, came to
Winnebago to give a concert under the auspices of the Young Men's Sunday
Evening Club.

The Young Men's Sunday Evening Club of the Congregational Church prided
itself (and justifiably) on what the papers called its "auspices." It
scorned to present to Winnebago the usual lyceum attractions--Swiss bell
ringers, negro glee clubs, and Family Fours. Instead, Schumann-Heink
sang her lieder for them; McCutcheon talked and cartooned for them;
Madame Bloomfield-Zeisler played. Winnebago was one of those wealthy
little Mid-Western towns whose people appreciate the best and set out to
acquire it for themselves.

To the Easterner, Winnebago, and Oshkosh, and Kalamazoo, and Emporia are
names invented to get a laugh from a vaudeville audience. Yet it is the
people from Winnebago and Emporia and the like whom you meet in Egypt,
and the Catalina Islands, and at Honolulu, and St. Moritz. It is in the
Winnebago living-room that you are likely to find a prayer rug got in
Persia, a bit of gorgeous glaze from China, a scarf from some temple in
India, and on it a book, hand-tooled and rare. The Winnebagoans seem to
know what is being served and worn, from salad to veilings, surprisingly
soon after New York has informed itself on those subjects. The
7:52 Northwestern morning train out of Winnebago was always pretty
comfortably crowded with shoppers who were taking a five-hour run down
to Chicago to get a hat and see the new musical show at the Illinois.

So Schabelitz's coming was an event, but not an unprecedented one.
Except to Theodore. Theodore had a ticket for the concert (his mother
had seen to that), and he talked of nothing else. He was going with his
violin teacher, Emil Bauer. There were strange stories as to why Emil
Bauer, with his gift of teaching, should choose to bury himself in this
obscure little Wisconsin town. It was known that he had acquaintance
with the great and famous of the musical world. The East End set fawned
upon him, and his studio suppers were the exclusive social events in
Winnebago.

Schabelitz was to play in the evening. At half past three that afternoon
there entered Brandeis' Bazaar a white-faced, wide-eyed boy who was
Theodore Brandeis; a plump, voluble, and excited person who was Emil
Bauer; and a short, stocky man who looked rather like a foreign-born
artisan--plumber or steam-f