“Oh,” I answered, “oh, I don’t know whom it is by.” “It out-Berliozes Berlioz,” he added. “Is it his?” “Perhaps. I don’t remember. I am tired. Let me rest a moment without talking.” “Well,” he continued, “it was a terrible strain to listen to it. I am quite played out—feel as if—forgive the comparison—as if I had spent the last hour in a dentist’s chair. However, for relief’s sake, let’s go to dinner. Are you aware that we haven’t eaten any thing since early morning?” After dinner Merivale insisted that we should take a long walk “to shake out the kinks,” and after the long walk we were tired enough to return to our pillows. I went straight to sleep; but my sleep was troubled. As soon as Merivale had said goodnight and extinguished the gas, memory began to repeat the music I had played. I heard it throughout my sleep. Every little while I would wake up and try to banish it by fixing my attention on other matters. But it kept thrumming away in my brain despite myself. I could not silence it. Merivale’s reference to a dentist’s chair was, if inelegant, at least a graphic one. I got as hopelessly irritated as I could have done with a score of dentists simultaneously grinding at my teeth. My very arteries seemed to be beating to its rhythm. In one fit of wakefulness, that lasted longer than its predecessors had done, I found myself unconsciously tattooing it upon the wall at my bed’s head. “Is that you?” Merivale’s voice demanded from out of the darkness. “Yes,” I replied. “Aren’t you asleep?” “Mercy, no. That music you played—or rather, stray fragments of it, keep running through my brain. I haven’t been able to sleep for a long while.” “That’s singular. It affects me the same way. I was just drumming it on the wall. I’ve been trying to get rid of it all night.” “It has wonderful staying powers, for a fact. I’m glad you’re awake, though. Companionship in misery is sweet.” “Yes, I also feel rather more comfortable now that you have spoken. Do you know, it’s an immense puzzle to me, that music? I can’t imagine where or when I ever learned it. And yet it is not the sort of thing one would be apt to forget. I can’t recognize the style even, can’t get a clew to the composer.” “The style is emphatically that of Berlioz.” “Perhaps so. But it can’t be by Berlioz, because I never learned any thing by Berlioz at all.” “Hum!” A pause. Then, “Say, Lexow—” “Well?” “It isn’t possible that it’s original, is it?” “Original? How do you mean?” “Why, an improvisation—a little thing of your own.” “Oh, no; oh, no, I never improvise—at least an entire composition, like that. Nobody does. It bears all the marks of careful workmanship. It must be something well-known that has temporarily slipped from my memory. It’s too striking not to be well-known. Tomorrow I’ll go through my music and find it; and I’ll wager it will turn out to be quite familiar. Only, it’s extremely odd that I can’t place it.” “Why wait till to-morrow?”