The theatre had been very cleverly placed in the doorway between two rooms, but as the piano was in the same room where the audience sat, I had to rush backward and forward continually. For instance, when Gustav pulled the curtain to disclose the depths of the Rhine, I played the Rhine music, then would creep back under the table on which the theatre was placed and help him manipulate the Rhine Maidens. Then I would rush back again to play the music accompanying the awakening of the Gold and so on until the change of scene when, as the rising sun shines upon the mighty walls of Walhalla, I would reproduce the stately harmonies of the Walhalla motive. As I look back on it now, it must have been an absolutely crazy performance, but the audience was hugely delighted and contributed so liberally that my co-director and I had a surplus with which to begin preparations for another play. Some parents on reading this may think that all this was a huge waste of time, but I cannot agree with them. Quite apart from the fact that it taught me a good deal in the use of the brush, it was a great stimulus to the imagination and a welcome outlet for the desire all children have to live in a make-believe world of fancy. At any rate, Gustav Schirmer and I can claim that we were the first to produce Wagner’s “Rhinegold” in America, and it is possible that this was the germ for my decision eighteen years later to form the Damrosch Opera Company solely for the purpose of producing Wagner throughout America. The dolls’ theatre was, however, not my only diversion from my school and musical studies. At one Christmas my father and mother gave me a very complete tool chest, with which I fashioned, among other things, a dolls’ house for my sisters and quite a little fleet of boats. I remember one three-master, about three feet in length, the wood for which I obtained from a foreman at the Steinway piano factory, then situated on Park Avenue. This three-master with all sails set won several races for me on the pond in Central Park. In those days, Central Park was considered very far uptown, and where now the palaces of millionaires flank its borders, Irish squatters lived in improvised huts around which goats would gain a meagre livelihood from the rocks stretching on all sides. These squatters established a kind of lien on the land, which I believe was recognized as having some legal force when the property became more and more valuable and the owners began to grade the land for residential purposes.