From time to time certain questions came up on which I could not agree with him.

He would then take me quietly by the ear, bend my head and hold my ear to the table for a minute or two.

Then, he would ask whether I had changed my mind.

As I had not, he would think it over and very often he would confess that I was right.
"Your childhood," Gounod once told me, "wasn't musical." He was wrong, for he did not know the many tokens of my childhood.

Many of my attempts are unfinished--to say nothing of those I destroyed--but among them are songs, choruses, cantatas, and overtures, none of which will ever see the light.