This was before the days of fast steamships; then the passage of the Atlantic was made in sailing vessels, and often the voyage lasted as many weeks as now it is measured by days. The Thomas family found passage on an American vessel; and it was six long weeks after their departure that they landed, on a hot July morning in the year 1845, in the city of New York. There was little or no real music in the United States. A few people played the piano or cornet, there were a number of brass bands, and some of the theatres boasted of a few musicians, but orchestras and good music were unknown. The Thomas family was a large one, and the father worked far into the night, playing in theatre orchestras, to provide for his wife and children. It was only natural that young Theodore, with his musical talent, should be called upon to help; and so almost from the beginning the boy labored with the father, playing his violin in various theatres, at a dancing-school, and wherever he could earn an honest dollar. Three years later the father enlisted in a navy band, and the boy followed him, playing second horn to the father’s first. But a year later, both father and son left the navy; and as the former was now able alone to provide for the family, young Theodore found himself free to carry out his own plans and lay the foundations for his future. With a little box of clothing, his violin, and a bundle of posters announcing a concert by “Master T-T,” Theodore set out alone to try his fortune with the world. For a year he wandered through the Southern states, giving his concerts in hotel dining-rooms, in schoolhouses, or wherever he considered it possible to gather an audience. As the people arrived, Theodore would stand at the door and take in the money; then, when he thought that all who were coming were present, he would hurry to the front of the hall and begin the concert. A year later he was back again in New York, poor in pocket but rich in experience of the world. “I was then fifteen years old,” he later wrote, “and somehow had recognized the necessity of studying if I expected to accomplish anything in this world. But what? I did not know, of course, that a general education was needed, or even what it meant. My first idea was to become a virtuoso, so I began to practise and play in concerts.” Shortly after his return to New York, the fifteen-year-old boy was engaged as the leading violinist in the orchestra of a German theatre. But this experience gave him more than an actual living; for here he became acquainted with the plays of the great German poets and masters of literature, and he also widened his musical horizon far beyond the rather limited boundaries which had up to that time confined it.