What a pretty picture Fräulein von Bunsen made in those days with her sweet expression, and pink and white complexion, leaning back in her bath-chair in her pink dress and hat with pink roses, pink veil and sunshade, looking a very rosebud herself! She was like my mother in this also, that the same treatment by which the latter was restored to health was very effective in her case too, and after undergoing it she spent many years in our house. Very intelligent, she possessed in a high degree the riper wisdom peculiar to those who have watched from afar the waves of life go surging by, themselves untouched by their tumult. An invalid looks on at the spectacle of human existence with something of the aloofness of a recluse, and is able to preserve the same childlike candour and crystalline purity of soul. No passion had ever stirred the depths of hers. It was like a deep transparent lake, in which earth and sky are reflected, clouds and sunshine, night and storm, and which yet remains unchanged through all. She reached her eightieth year in the same untroubled harmony of thought and feeling, her features very little altered by age, and her voice as sweet and clear as ever. Music was the very centre of her being, round which her whole existence revolved. I played duets with her for hours together, learning to know all the best works of the great classic composers so thoroughly and well, it was as if the glorious floods of melody had passed into my veins, to flow there mingled with my blood for evermore. How often did we thus succeed in flinging away all sorrow and care, feeling our troubles ooze out at the finger-tips, and our souls grow lighter as we played! All the days of my youth seem to pass before me, whenever I hear Beethoven’s Symphonies: certain of them,--the second, and that in C minor,--represent for me, as do Schubert’s Quartet and Mozart’s Symphony in G minor, very special phases of my existence, storms that were laid to rest by their potent spell. Our piano was a very old instrument whose keys were yellow with age, but to us it had the fulness of tone of a whole orchestra. And to strengthen the illusion, my father would often join us and hum or whistle some special passage as it is written for the different instruments, to try to give me some faint idea of the orchestral effect. In our enthusiasm we had soon forgotten the limitations of the means at our command, above all we forgot our own imperfections, we felt the whole orchestration, and in the grandeur of the conception the inadequacy of the performance was quite swallowed up. Is that not the best way to enjoy these divine masterpieces, the safest method of interpretation? It would not suffice, I am well aware, for the exigencies of a modern audience, incapable of drawing on the imagination to supply the deficiencies of execution. The hurry and bustle of the century leave no room for the modest efforts of a dilettante, imbued