Thomas Ryan remembers the Viennese children's visit to Boston in Recollections of an old musician (E. P. Dutton & Co, 1899): "The children were said to be poor waifs of the Austrian capital, taken up, given a home, educated, and provided for by the old lady. From the large mass of children in her care she selected the shapeliest and prettiest and taught them to dance and to do everything in the choreographic art [...] I must confess in advance my inability to describe the beauty of their performance. It was simply ideal. The opening dance was the 'Pas des Fleurs' [...] 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."