On a frigid day last winter (January, 1922) travelling with my wife on an untidy, dilapidated post-war train through Germany, on my way to Stockholm to fill an engagement to conduct the orchestra there, we read in an English magazine an article on Tennyson ending with a description of the old graveyard in which lie the bodies of his two grandsons, both killed in the war. “I did not know,” I said, looking out over the black wintry flat German country, “that Tennyson lost _two_ grandsons in the war!” “But so did _my_ father,” my wife said proudly, and she spoke truly, for another nephew, Emmons Blaine of Chicago was no less a war victim than Walker. Unable to pass the physical tests required to enter the army he agonized to find the nation’s greatest need behind the lines in which to enlist. He chose shipbuilding and offered himself as a workman at Hogg Island, near Philadelphia. Although never overstrong, he worked early and late, and fell a victim of the terrible epidemic of the “flu,” dying at Lansdown on October 9, 1918. Though Walker had already died in France, we knew only at the time that he was wounded. Of his death we learned four days later. Thus these two cousins, Emmons and Walker, are forever enshrined together in our anguish, in our pride, and in our love. III FOUNDING OF THE SYMPHONY AND ORATORIO SOCIETIES OF NEW YORK In 1873 Anton Rubinstein, greatest of Russian pianists, accompanied by the violinist Wieniawski, came to America by invitation of Steinway and Sons. He dined at our house and expressed wonder that my father had not yet been able to achieve a position in New York commensurate with his reputation and capacity. My father explained to him how difficult the situation was and that the entire orchestral field was monopolized by Theodore Thomas. He told Rubinstein that when he had first arrived in New York he had met Thomas at the music store of Edward Schubert in Union Square and that after the introduction Thomas had said to him: “I hear, Doctor Damrosch, that you are a very fine musician, but I want to tell you one thing: whoever crosses my path I crush.” Thomas at that time really believed that America was not large enough to contain more than one orchestra, but he lived long enough to see my father surpass him at the head of a symphony orchestra, as founder of the first great music festival in New York and, above all, of opera in German at the Metropolitan. In 1881 the first symphony orchestra on a permanent basis had been founded in Boston by Major Higginson, and before Thomas’s death there were half a dozen great subsidized orchestras actively operating in the United States, a number which has since then increased to twelve. Rubinstein said to my father: “Why don’t you begin by founding an oratorio society, and that will lead to other things?”