I procured for him, through the strategic employment of a passing servant, something to eat, and we staid in concealment there until the function had come to an end, and his wife had begun to search for him.

He was quite happy, consuming his salad and beer behind the stairs and telling me in detail his conception of certain of the figures of Celtic mythology which he had had in mind while composing his sonata.
To visitors at his house in Peterboro, he said one morning, on leaving them, "I am going to the cabin to write some of my rotten melodies!" He was sincerely distrustful concerning the worth of any composition which he had finished; especially so, of course, concerning his more youthful performances.

He once sent a frantic telegram to Teresa Carreno, upon learning from an announcement that she was to play his early Concert Etude (op.

36) for the first time: "Don't put that dreadful thing on your programme"; and for certain of his more popular and hackneyed pieces, as the "Hexentanz" and the much-mauled and over-sentimental song, "Thy Beaming Eyes," he had a detestation that was amusing in its virulence.

He regretted at times that his earlier orchestral works--"Hamlet and Ophelia" and "Lancelot and Elaine"-- had been published; and he was invariably tormented by questionings and misgivings after he had committed even his ripest work to his publisher.