In the spring of 1891 Carnegie Hall, which had been built by Andrew Carnegie as a home for the higher musical activities of New York, was inaugurated with a music festival in which the New York Symphony and Oratorio Societies took part. In order to give this festival a special significance, I invited Peter Iljitsch Tschaikowsky, the great Russian composer, to come to America and to conduct some of his own works. In all my many years of experience I have never met a great composer so gentle, so modest—almost diffident—as he. We all loved him from the first moment—my wife and I, the chorus, the orchestra, the employees of the hotel where he lived, and of course the public. He was not a conductor by profession and in consequence the technic of it, the rehearsals and concerts, fatigued him excessively; but he knew what he wanted and the atmosphere which emanated from him was so sympathetic and love-compelling that all executants strove with double eagerness to divine his intentions and to carry them out. The performance which he conducted of his Third Suite, for instance, was admirable, although it is in parts very difficult; and as he was virtually the first of great living composers to visit America, the public received him with jubilance. He came often to our house, and, I think, liked to come. He was always gentle in his intercourse with others, but a feeling of sadness seemed never to leave him, although his reception in America was more than enthusiastic and the visit so successful in every way that he made plans to come back the following year. Yet he was often swept by uncontrollable waves of melancholia and despondency. The following year in May I went to England with my wife, and received an invitation from Charles Villiers Stanford, then professor of music at Cambridge, to visit the old university during the interesting commencement exercises at which honorary degrees of Doctor of Music were to be given to five composers of five different countries—Saint-Saëns of France, Boito of Italy, Grieg of Norway, Bruch of Germany, and Tschaikowsky of Russia. The proceedings proved highly interesting and enjoyable. As each recipient of the honor stepped forward in his doctor’s robe, the orator addressed him in a discourse of orotund Latin phrases, praising his many virtues and accomplishments, and these phrases were constantly interrupted by the clatter of facetious remarks and requests from the undergraduates in the balcony, all this according to old-established custom. Sometimes the uproar became so great that the presiding officer had to arise and demand “Silentium.”