However, in spite of the world’s most glamorous talent, the second great festival was a flat failure. The crowds would not come. One day there were 22,000 performers on the stage and only 7,000 people in the audience. Although _The Anvil Chorus_ was again on the program and also the _Soldiers’ Chorus_ given with red fire and many other embellishments, yet the people stayed away. No one blamed Gilmore, _the unsurpassable_, as he was called. He had done his part and produced every attraction which he had advertised. Gilmore left Boston almost immediately for New York City. He was then forty-four years old, still fired with ambition and a desire to produce huge, perfect, spectacular performances. His band of one hundred players, always the most talented to be found, was in great demand. In that year, 1873, Gilmore gave his last “big show,” this year in Chicago. It was a series of grand concerts celebrating the restoration of the city after the great fire. The programs were held in the huge concourse of the new passenger station of the Lake Shore Railroad, a room two blocks long, holding 40,000 people--_and Gilmore filled it_. He added two-hundred musicians to his band, had a chorus of 1,000 singers and to the delight of the audience he again played _The Anvil Chorus_ with firemen, anvils, cannon and bells. The Gilmore Band in 1875 played at Gilmore’s Gardens in New York City making the unusual record of one-hundred-fifty consecutive concerts to crowded houses. A highlight on the last concert of the season was a cornet quartette by the four greatest cornetists of that time--Arbuckle, Bent, Levy and Gilmore. In 1876 Gilmore and his band starred at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. For thirteen successive summer seasons the Gilmore Band played at New York’s popular Manhattan Beach resort. Gilmore and his noted organization toured the entire United States repeatedly. He was a marvelous organizer, a superfine showman and a good financier and business manager. As a composer he did not rate high. He is generally given credit for having written the well-known song _When Johnny Comes Marching Home_, although many believed that he was not the author of the composition. That Gilmore was versatile and resourceful everyone admits. In 1890 when his band was asked to play at General Sherman’s funeral, Gilmore revised _Marching Through Georgia_, a rather inside-out-version, making an unusual, unknown funeral dirge, yet which many people felt was vaguely familiar. While playing at the St. Louis Exposition, September 24, 1892, Gilmore died suddenly. His wife and only daughter were with him at the time. John Philip Sousa, Gilmore’s good friend, two days later at the opening concert of his great band at Plainfield, New Jersey, played _The Voice of a Departed Soul_, one of Gilmore’s own compositions. This seemed to be an appropriate musical finale to the life of a man who had gloried in producing dramatic and spectacular effects. ARTHUR PRYOR