First Lap

In the soot-blackened railroad yards near Boston's Back Bay was heard one afternoon last week the sound of great music. Yardsmen and scrubwomen stopped work, gathered around a sidetracked private car whence it came. "Paderooski," one workman told the next as the knot of listeners grew. And Pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski it was indeed, practicing for two hours the recital he would give magnificently that evening in Boston's Symphony Hall.

It was the end of the first lap of Paderewski's nationwide tour. He has played to record-breaking audiences all the way from Portland, Me. to Chicago and East again, attracted hundreds who would never think of listening to other pianists. In Philadelphia he had to have the piano pushed offstage before his audience would leave the hall. Like Conductor Arturo Toscanini (TIME, Nov. 24) Paderewski is this year in the U. S. without his wife for the first time. Mme Paderewska is ill of an incurable disease in Switzerland.

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