It was an event which none who witnessed it will ever forget. The proscenium arch was hung with black, and the “set” was the mediæval interior used in the third act of “Lucia.” In the centre was the great catafalque, its outlines almost obscured by masses of flowers--lilies, roses, orchids, literally by tens of thousands--flanked by two Hebrew candelabra, surmounted by the bust of the impresario that had been presented to him, during his illness, by the members of the company.
Promptly at eleven the Metropolitan Orchestra began the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica,” and, carried by six skull-capped bearers, the coffin, entirely covered by a pall of violets, was placed upon the stage. Mme. Homer and Riccardo Martin and Robert Blass sang Handel’s “Largo”; the choir-boys from Calvary Church who had appeared in the first American production of “Parsifal” intoned a setting of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”; Dr. Wise and Professor William H. Carpenter, of Columbia, spoke of the dead man’s work, and then, with the notes of the Chopin funeral-march sobbing through the Opera House--attended by music-lovers, judges, artists, financiers, leaders in almost every walk of life, there was taken from the scene of his greatest work the body of the weaver-boy of Bielitz.
These memories have taken me somewhat far afield and consumed much of the space that I had intended to devote, in this chapter, to my own activities. I should like to tell of my service as director of the Educational Alliance, the consolidation of a dozen activities for the benefit of children--and particularly the Jewish children--of that Lower East Side neighbourhood; and, too, of my work on the Board of Directors of the Mt. Sinai Hospital, the institution which my father helped so many years before; and of my interest in the Henry Street Settlement so ably developed by my friend Lillian Wald, my connection with which eventually led Mrs. Morgenthau and me to establish the Bronx House. Mrs. Morgenthau once taught in the Louis’ Downtown Sabbath School at 267 Henry Street, and right next door to it Miss Lillian D. Wald and Miss MacDowell, the daughter of General MacDowell of Civil War fame, had started an experiment that was to grow into a vast benefit for the entire community. Up to that time the people of the Lower East Side who were unable to afford regular medical treatment for themselves or their babies went without it until the last minute and then sought the rare dispensaries; for any other sort of help, they turned to the district political bosses, who never failed to require a substantial return for favours and who had few favours to dispense to those who neither voted themselves nor controlled the votes of others. Miss Wald practically originated the idea of the house-to-house, or the tenement-to-tenement, visiting trained nurse, who made friends with the sick and needy in their own homes, cared for the ill, showed their relatives how to care for them, gave practical lessons on the bringing up of children, and demonstrated that household hygiene is the ounce of prevention that is worth a pound of cure. Out of this evolved the now famous Henry Street Settlement.