Returning last autumn from a year abroad, during which I had not heard a word of Fergus, I found he had turned himself into a professional violin-teacher. The insurance job had passed out, and for a few weeks he had supported himself by playing the organ in a small Catholic church. There was jugglery with his salary, however, and it annoyed him to be so intimate a figure in a ritual to which he could only refer in irony. Priests whose “will to power” background he analyzed to me with Nietzschean fidelity always repelled him. He was saved from falling back on the industrious parents who had so strangely borne him by an offer to play the harmonium in the orchestra of a fashionable restaurant. To this opportunity of making eighteen dollars a week he had evidently gone with a new and pleasurable sense of the power of wealth. It was easy, he said, but the heat and the lights, the food and the long evening hours fairly nauseated him, and he gave the work up. All this time, I gathered, his parents had been restive over a certain economic waste. They seemed to feel that his expensive musical education should be capitalized more firmly and more profitably. His mother had even deplored his lack of ambition. She had explored and had discovered that one made much money as a “vaudeville act.” He had obtained a trial at an Upper Bronx moving-picture vaudeville theater. Fergus told me that the nervous girl who had gone on the stage before him had been cut short in the middle of her “Fox-Trot Lullaby,” or whatever her song was, by hostile yells from the audience. Fergus himself went on in rather a depressed mood, and hardly did himself justice. He played the Bach air, and a short movement from Brahms. He did not, however, get that rapport with his audience which he felt the successful vaudeville artist should feel. They had not yelled at him, but they had refused to applaud, and the circuit manager had declined to engage him. After this experience it occurred to Fergus that he liked to teach, and that his training had made him a professional musician. His personality, he felt, was not unfavorable. By beginning modestly he saw no reason why he should not build up a clientèle and an honorable competence. When I saw him a week later at the Music Settlement, he told me that there was no longer any doubt that he had found his lifework. His fees are very small and his pupils are exacting. He has practised much besides. He told me the other day that teaching was uninspiring drudgery. He had decided to give it up, and compose songs.