Of course all these difficulties could not have been so happily solved had I not always had devoted and efficient heads of the different departments of our organization. George Engles is the most careful of business managers; Rissland, the orchestra manager, has always been tireless in his efforts to keep the men in good discipline and spirits and to look after their welfare; and Hans Goettich, who has been my baggage-master and librarian for over twenty-five years, is a perfect marvel. I remember seeing him flag an entire train because he had suddenly noticed that our baggage-car, containing all our music and musical instruments, had been hooked on to it by mistake. As this train was going to New Orleans, while we were headed for Chicago, we would have had to stop giving concerts for several days until that baggage-car had been traced and sent back to us! On Goettich devolves the entire responsibility for the library, which is packed in dozens of boxes and kept according to a system of his own. On these long tours our programmes are changed more or less every day, partly to avoid the monotony of repetition for us and partly because each community has its own needs according to its stage of musical development, which I try to gauge very thoroughly when making up my programmes. This means incessant work for the librarian and mistakes might easily occur, but during all these years I cannot recall a single concert when, through fault of Goettich’s, an orchestral part has been lost or misplaced. This is a remarkable record. I remember giving a symphony concert in William J. Bryan’s town of Lincoln, Nebraska. I found a typical Middle Western community, living in nice houses with green lawns, with neatly bricked streets and concrete sidewalks, and roomy large-windowed schools. The theatre in which we played was thoroughly modern, clean, and well lighted, and the audience well dressed and appreciative. One of my double-bass players told me that he had played there thirty years before with Theodore Thomas. In those days Lincoln was but a frontier town and the theatre and the public who had come to hear the Thomas Orchestra were of a more or less primitive character. My double-bass player told me that with a colleague, whose head was devoid of hair, he had stood directly below a proscenium box in which a group of cowboys were seated. While the orchestra was playing Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony,” one of these cowboys, who was chewing tobacco violently, amused himself by spitting frequently and always aiming for the bald head of the bass player, who had to keep one agitated eye on the conductor and the other on this horribly resourceful listener, in order to avoid his only too-well-directed shots.