I held him in real love and honor.

When the Mexican War Pension Act was passed by Congress I took his papers to General Black, the Commissioner of Pensions, and related this story.
"I have promised Gen.

Cerro Gordo Williams," said General Black, referring to the then senior United States Senator from Kentucky, "that his name shall go first on the roll of these Mexican pensioners.
But"-- and the General looked beamingly in my face, a bit tearful, and says he: "Wake Holman's name shall come right after." And there it is.
III I was very carefully and for those times not ignorantly taught in music.
Schell, his name was, and they called him "Professor." He lived over in Georgetown, where he had organized a little group of Prussian refugees into a German club, and from my tenth to my fifteenth year--at first regularly, and then in a desultory way as I came back to Washington City from my school in Philadelphia, he hammered Bach and Handel and Mozart--nothing so modern as Mendelssohn--into my not unwilling nor unreceptive mind, for my bent was in the beginning to compose dramas, and in the end operas.
Adelina Patti was among my child companions.

Once in the national capital, when I was 12 years old and Adelina 9, we played together at a charity concert.

She had sung "The Last Rose of Summer," and I had played her brother-in-law's variation upon "Home, Sweet Home." The audience was enthusiastic.