I never understood Boston—or, in fact, New England—until I went back there after having spent years in Europe. There are many delightful qualities about the Bostonese type of mind, but their comprehension of the senses only through abstract matters limits their personal enjoyments. However, we cannot quarrel with them on some scores. Their love of music, for instance. I have heard music in three places in my life in such a way as to approach the indulgences of the Mad King of Württemberg. If one is not alone, one must have the sense of being alone; there must be no rustling of programs and no talking. Therefore the perfect way to listen to music is to have an audience composed of one’s friends. You cannot tell a stranger to “shut up,” but you can a friend; and you can also ignore him and thus establish solitude. In the Vaudeville Club, in the studio of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, where every year he used to give a Sunday concert in memory of his dear friend Welles’s birthday (as a rule it was a stringed quartet); and in the St. Botolph Club of Boston, I have really enjoyed music. We had the Kneisel and the Adamovski Quartets—the most wonderful music I ever heard. The man sitting next to me might have been anybody from a prince to Paderewski. I learned more about music and fell more in love with it than I had in all the remainder of my life because I got it under congenial surroundings. Paderewski I never knew well, but have had the pleasure of playing many a game of pool with him. It was said that he ate nothing and drank only water during the day, if he was to play at night, a habit I can understand; for whenever I have had the problem of making what was to me a great composition, I have found it necessary to train for it by exhausting my nervous forces, thereby rendering myself simple in thought. So I imagine him drawing himself fine. After a performance he would arrive at the St. Botolph Club, wanting much food and, when he had fed, much fun. “Now let’s play poker; now let’s play pool.” It was not the game, it was the sociability he wanted; because, once in it, he never knew when it was his turn to play, never could remember to ante, and talked all the time. Paderewski comes nearer to being the traditional genius than any other modern—all the eccentricities with the real stuff underneath. They say he kept, in his younger days, a pet poodle to supply the requests he received for locks of his hair. And then the story of the cherry stones which a woman found lying on the corner of his mantelpiece one day and appropriated, and which she had set in a pin of clover-leaf pattern. Upon her calling the artist’s attention to it, he remarked: “That is one of the carelessnesses of my valet. It must have been he who left them there. Personally, I loathe cherries.”