Orlando Tompkins, the intimate friend of Booth, kept an apothecary shop at the corner of West and Washington streets, close by the Boston Theater. Booth was then the matinée idol; and the young ladies, who wrote him poems and letters, often left them at the apothecary’s, where he usually dropped in after the play. One day a silly woman sent him a gold chain in a letter, telling her messenger to wait outside and see what happened. Booth strolled in at the usual time, found the letter, broke the seal, read the contents, tossed the letter into the stove; twirling the chain in his hand for a moment, as if puzzled what to do with it, he strode across the shop and fastened it round the neck of the great Maltese cat that lay asleep in the window. Next to Green Peace and the Boston Theater, I felt more at home at the Boston Music Hall than in any other place of my small world. To-day Boston has a fine Symphony Hall, an admirable Opera House; to some persons of my generation, neither compares in importance to the Music Hall, built two years before I was born, by that pioneer society, the Harvard Musical Association. The same year, 1852, Dwight’s Journal of Music was founded. In both enterprises the leading figure was John Sullivan Dwight, president of the association, editor of the journal. There is a certain romance connected with the very inception of Music Hall. Jenny Lind was coming to Boston; the city had no fitting auditorium for so great an artist. A few lovers of music got together, raised the money, and built the hall in what was then “record time.” Between the ages of six and twenty years, I haunted the Music Hall, in company with my adopted son, John Dwight. At the time of his adoption I was seven, and Mr. Dwight was fifty years old. We celebrated the event by going to the dedication of the great organ at the Music Hall. For me it is still the greatest of organs, though I have been to Haarlem and Freiburg. I recognized in the crowd that filled the hall some of the “founders”; Charles C. Perkins, blue-eyed, golden-haired, seraphic in temper as well as face; Doctor Baxter Upham, Mr. Robert Apthorp, Mr. George Derby, and the architect, our friend, George Snell, an Englishman who lived many years in Boston. For months we had watched the slow upbuilding of the organ, seen the golden pipes unpacked, tested, and laid [Illustration: EDWIN BOOTH] in a row on the stage. Now everything was in place, the mouths of the painted singing women seemed ready to breathe out music. A pair of mighty colossi bore the weight of the massive front on their bowed heads and shoulders. Before the organ stood the bronze statue of Beethoven, now in Symphony Hall.