Music-mad, I arrived in Paris during the last weeks of the World's Fair of 1878, impelled there by a parching desire to see Franz Liszt, if not to hear him. He was then honorary director of the Austro-Hungarian section. But I could not find him, although I heard of him everywhere, of musical fêtes and the usual glittering company that had always surrounded this extraordinary son of fortune. One day I fancied I saw him. I was sadly walking the Rue de Rivoli of an October afternoon, when in a passing carriage I saw an old chap with bushy white hair, his face full of expressive warts, and in his mouth a long black cigar, which he was furiously puffing. Liszt! I gasped, and started in pursuit. It was not an easy job to keep up with the carriage. At last, because of a blocked procession, I caught up and took a long stare, the object of which composedly smiled at me, but did not truly convince me that he was Franz Liszt. You see there were so many different pictures of him; even the warts were not always the same in number. When I am in the Cambyses vein I swear I've seen Liszt. Perhaps I did. Liszt or no Liszt, my ambition was fired, and at the advice of Frederick Boscovitz, a pupil of Liszt and cousin of Rafael Joseffy, I went to the Conservatoire Nationale, with a letter of introduction to the acting secretary, Emile Rety. I was told that I was too old to enter, being a few months past eighteen. I was disappointed and voiced my woes to Lucy Hamilton Hooper, then a clever writer and correspondent of several American newspapers. Her husband was Vice-Consul Robert Hooper and he kindly introduced me to General Fairchild, the consul, and after a cross-examination I was given a letter in which the United States Government testified to my good social standing (I was not a bandit, nor yet an absconder from justice) and extreme youth. Armed with this formidable document, I again besieged the gates of the great French conservatoire--whose tuition, it must be remembered, is free. I was successful, inasmuch as I was permitted to present myself at the yearly examination, which took place November 13 (ominous date). To say that I studied hard and shook in my boots is a literal statement. I lived at the time in an alley-like street off the Boulevard des Batignolles and lived luxuriously on five dollars a week, eating one satisfying meal a day (with a hot bowl of coffee in the morning) and practising on a wretched little cottage piano as long as my neighbours would stand the noise. They chucked boots or any old faggot they could find at my door, and after twelve hours I was so tired of patrolling the keyboard that I was glad to stop. Then, a pillow on my stomach to keep down the pangs of a youthfully gorgeous appetite, I would lie in bed till dinner-time. O Chopin! O consommé and boiled beef! O sour blue wine at six cents the litre!