school-boy detected in the act of doing something he ought not to do.

"Often though I was with him--sometimes a week at a time in
Peterboro--I never could persuade him to play for me. I once asked
Paderewski to play for me his new set of songs, and he promptly did
so. But MacDowell always was 'out of practice,' or had some other
excuse, generally a witticism or bit of sarcasm at his own expense. I
am sorry now that I did not urge him with more persistence, for he
might have yielded in the end, and I would have got a more _intime_
idea of his playing; for after all a musical tête-à-tête like that is
preferable to any public hearing. I never heard Grieg play at a
concert, but I am sure that the hour I sat near him in his Bergen
home, while he played and his wife sang, gave me a better appreciation
of his skill as an interpreter than I could have got in a public hall
with an audience to distract his attention. One afternoon I called on
Saint-Saëns at his hotel after one of his concerts in New York.
Talking about it, he sat down at the piano, ran over his _Valse
Canariote_, and said: 'That's the way I _ought_ to have played it!'

"MacDowell was quite right in saying that he was out of practice; he
generally was, his duties as professor allowing him little time for
technical exercising; but once every few years he set to work and got
his fingers into a condition which enabled them to follow his
intentions; and those intentions, it is needless to say, were always
honourable! He never played any of those show pieces which help along
a pianist, but confined himself to the best he could find.

"Usually the first half of a recital was devoted to the classical and
romantic masters, the second to his own compositions. Beethoven,
Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Grieg, were likely to be represented, and he