The opening dance was the “ Pas des Fleurs,” music by Max Maretzek,—then an unknown name in America ; he came over from Europe a few years later. The dance consisted of andante introduction, a set of five waltzes, and a lengthy finale. When the curtain rose, the children were seen to be built up, about thirty of them, in the form of a huge bouquet, round which were two garlands or rings of flowers (children) that swung slowly around the middle mass.

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The music was good. Each waltz had its appropriate dancing figures. The finale brought all into a wild, whirling, passionate movement, and it seemed to us at times as if the whole thing must go to pieces; but the artistic plan was perfectly carried out. The “ pleasures of memory ” were never more thoroughly realized by any one than by me at this moment of writing ; after a lapse of over fifty years, the picture of the dancing children is before me in its living, pulsating shape.

The whole audience was seemingly in ecstasy with the performance. The happy, bright faces and the gleeful play of the children stirred up the deepest emotions of the spectators. Many people were in tears. I know that the old oboist at my elbow did not play many notes during the early part of the waltz, for tears ran down his face like rain. When the dance finally ended and the curtain fell, the audience was in a kind of emotional insanity, and gave vent to it in wild applause. The scenes were so wonderfully beautiful, and so unlike anything before witnessed by a majority of the audience, that they felt as if they had had a dream or vision of Paradise