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“None,” said his son.

Being president of the Free Synagogue, I requested Rabbi Wise to officiate. I communicated with the directors of the Conried Opera Company, who consented to the plan, and every branch of the organization from the orchestra to the scene-shifters volunteered to help.

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.