Fifteen years later, in 1870, George F. Root, who had assisted my father in his musical convention work in the East, but who had settled in Chicago and was doing the same kind of pioneer work in the West, was holding a summer musical convention in South Bend, Indiana. He wished to introduce piano as well as vocal teaching, and invited me to take charge of the piano classes. It was a fearfully hot summer, and during the month I was in South Bend the temperature was continuously close to 100 deg.. Toward the close of the season concerts were given, and it was so hot that in lieu of a dress-coat I wore a linen duster, cut off at the waist. At the last concert I received a request from two or three people to play "Yankee Doodle" with one hand and "Old Hundred" with the other. Possibly they had heard me do so in 1855. Remembering my experience then, I made a few remarks, in which I told them that some little feeling had been created fifteen years before by my doing the same thing, but that--and here I got a little mixed--in playing "Yankee Doodle" with "Old Hundred" I did not intend any disrespect to "Yankee Doodle." At this the audience began to laugh. Schuyler Colfax, who was then Vice-President of the United States, was on the stage behind me, and I could hear him chuckling. I thought to myself, "Well, I have made some funny mistake, though I don't know what it is, so I won't go back and try to correct it." Afterward Mr. Colfax, who was a noted speaker, told me that whenever he made a _lapsus linguae_, if it amused the audience he never attempted to correct it. On my return from this concert tour to New York, I established the series of chamber-music concerts which, begun as an experiment, continued thirteen years. I also settled down as a teacher. While I had returned from Weimar with the full intention of continuing my career as a piano-virtuoso, and while my concert tour had been promising enough, I found that the public demanded a constant repetition of pieces to which it happened to take a liking, and I knew that I should soon weary of playing the same things over and over again. Moreover, I felt that from my father I had inherited a certain capacity for giving instruction, and that the chamber-music concerts and engagements with the Philharmonic and at other concerts in New York and elsewhere would serve to keep up my practice as a virtuoso. SETTLING DOWN TO TEACH