“On the contrary, the notion that you once learned it, then forgot it, then played it off without a fault from beginning to end, is trebly ridiculous. It was ridiculous of us to waste our time hunting for it, also. I am entirely convinced that it is yours. Why not? Ideas have come to other people—why not to you? Yesterday while you played, you were excited and wrought up, and the result was that you had an inspiration. By Jove, you’re lucky! It’s enough to make you famous.” “But, Merivale, fancy the absurdities you are uttering. Do you seriously suppose anybody—even a regular composer—could take up his fiddle and reel off a complicated thing like that without once halting? Why, man, there are four or five distinct movements. You might as well pretend that a mere elocutionist could write an intricate epic poem without once pausing to make an erasure or find a rhyme, as that I, a simple instrumentalist, could have done this.” “Well, there’s only oneway of settling the matter. We’ll refer it to an authority. You jot down a few specimen bars on paper, and I’ll submit it to your friend, Dr. Rodolph. Of course he will identify it at once, if it isn’t yours.” “If that will satisfy you, well and good,” I assented. In the course of the forenoon, Merivale, having procured a stock of music-paper at a shop in the neighborhood, said, “I don’t know how rapidly a man can write music, but if it isn’t too slow work, I’d seriously counsel you to put down the whole thing, while you’re about it. In fact I’d counsel you to do so any how. If by hazard it is original, you know, you’d better make a memorandum of it while it’s still fresh in your mind. Otherwise you might forget it. That often happens to me. A bright idea, a felicitous turn of phraseology, occurs to me when I’m away somewhere—in the horse-cars, at the theater, paying a call, or what-not—and if I don’t make an instant minute of it in my note-book, it’s sure to fly off and never be heard from again.” “We’ll see,” I returned. “I haven’t written a bar of music for such a long while that I don’t know how hard I shall find it. But I used to make a daily practice of writing from memory, because it increases one’s facility for sight-reading.”