tenor voice before it was spoiled by drink, and was fond of music,
though technically he knew nothing about it. He had a German friend who
when he died left him a musical scrapbook, of all sorts of odds and
ends of original text. There is where Foster got his melodies. When the
scrapbook gave out he gave out."

I took it as merely the spleen of a rival composer. But many years after
in Vienna I heard a concert given over exclusively to the performance
of certain posthumous manuscripts of Schubert. Among the rest were
selections from an unfinished opera--"Rosemonde," I think it was
called--in which the whole rhythm and movements and parts of the score
of Old Folks at Home were the feature.

It was something to have grown up contemporary, as it were, with these
songs. Many of them were written in the old Rowan homestead, just
outside of Bardstown, Ky., where Louis Philippe lived and taught, and
for a season Talleyrand made his abode. The Rowans were notable people.
John Rowan, the elder, head of the house, was a famous lawyer, who
divided oratorical honors with Henry Clay, and like Clay, was a Senator
in Congress; his son, "young John," as he was called, Stephen Foster's
pal, went as minister to Naples, and fought duels, and was as Bob
Acres wanted to be, "a devil of a fellow." He once told me he had been
intimate with Thackeray when they were wild young men in Paris, and that
they had both of them known the woman whom Thackeray had taken for the
original of Becky Sharp.

The Foster songs quite captivated my boyhood. I could sing a little, as
well as play, and learned each of them--especially Old Folks at Home
and My Old Kentucky Home--as they appeared. Their contemporary vogue was
tremendous. Nothing has since rivalled the popular impression they made,
except perhaps the Arthur Sullivan melodies.

Among my ambitions to be a great historian, dramatist, soldier and
writer of romance I desired also to be a great musician, especially a
great pianist. The bone-felon did the business for this later. But all
my life I have been able to thumb the keyboard at least for the children
to dance, and it has been a recourse and solace sometimes during
intervals of embittered journalism and unprosperous statesmanship.

V

Theodore Thomas and I used to play duos together. He was a master of the
violin before he took to orchestration. We remained the best of friends
to the end of his days.

On the slightest provocation, or n