His two younger daughters had been educated in music in Germany, and there was something more of music in the house than the mere classic portraits of Mozart and Beethoven which hung on the wall near the painting of the old castle at Nuremberg. They played duets, and once, at least, at a recital given in the town, we achieved the distinction of a number played on two pianos by my mother and her three sisters. The May festivals in “the City,” as we called Cincinnati in those days, were a part of existence, and my first excursion into the larger world was when my father took me to Cincinnati to hear Theodore Thomas’s Orchestra, which proved to be an excursion not only into a larger world, but eventually into a larger life,--that life of music, that life of a love of all the arts, which provides a consolation that would be complete could I but express myself in any one of them. I did, indeed, attempt some expression of the joys of that experience, for with more pretension than I could dare to-day, I wrote a composition, or paper, on Music which was printed in a child’s publication, and won for me a little prize. It was twenty-two years before I was able again to have any writing of mine accepted and published by a magazine. IV Urbana in those days was not without its atmosphere of culture, influenced in a degree by the presence of the Urbana University, a Swedenborgian college which in the days before the war had flourished, because so many of its students came from the southern states. It declined after the war, but even after that event, the presence of so many persons of the Swedenborgian persuasion, with their gentle manners and intellectual appreciation, kept the traditions alive, and the college itself continued, though not so flourishingly, on its endowed foundation. One of the tutors in it was a young, brown-haired man who several times a day passed by my grandfather’s home on his way to and from his classes, whom afterwards I came to admire for those writings to which was signed the name of Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen. He did not remain long in Urbana, not longer it seems than he could help, and to judge from some of his pictures of various phases of its life, he did not like the town as well as the Urbana folk themselves liked it. It was a rather self-sufficient town, I fancy, and it cared so little for change that it has scarcely changed at all, save as one misses the faces and the forms one used to see there in other days. It was the home of the distinguished family, and the birthplace, too, of John Quincy Adams Ward, the sculptor, and the possession of a personality in itself distinguishes a town. I was walking with my father across Market Square not long ago; it had shrunk in size and seemed little and mean and sordid, despite the new city hall that has replaced the old, and there was no miserable prisoner idly sweeping the cobblestones, though the negro drivers with their bull whips were snoozing there as formerly.