Of course you will perceive that I am no musician and no critic. I have not the ear of the one, nor the language of the other. I am simply one of those who like to hear what I like—hopeless. The Andante from the Sonata Pathétique haunted and eluded me for years and, but for a wandering pianist disguised as an investigator, I might have classed it with a dream. Sordid duties dull one to accept coarser things on a phonograph. “Yes,” said the doctor, “I have played through the East and on Canadian circuits, but I don’t care for the stage. I took up concert work, traveling with glee clubs and orchestras, but that wasn’t much better. Hurried life. I like the quiet places.” And he was a doctor in the Indian Service! Someone called: “Play it again!” And he played it again—on a banjo! Down under the hill were camped a bunch of troubadours that once had trooped with a second company, passing as the Original New York Cast. By the light of a lantern they played accompaniments on an old melodeon, dragged from the schoolhouse. A rousing chorus, and then a tenor voice: the Irish Love Song. Followed a roar of applause that brought drowsy Indians to the mesa edge. Strange Americanos! Strange Bohannas, who mock at drums and chanting, and who then make such queer music and many cries. And by midnight the fires would die down, one by one, to mere glows. The pueblo lights, high up along the mesa cornice, would be blotted out. Beyond the camps, only the sound of horses munching, the bray of a desert nightingale from the upper corrals, or the canter of a mounted policeman through the sand, as he gave a last look around before rolling in his blanket. Then silence under the dark star-strewn sky, a tranquil desert silence, to be broken, perhaps—who knows?—by ghostly sandals, as the padre walked to see that curious company, asleep in his one-time garden, guests of a pagan feast. XXII ON THE HEELS OF ADVENTURE I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seems, of some adventure that should justify the place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night and called me up again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen’s Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green shutters of the inn at Burford. —Stevenson: A Gossip on Romance Adventure! The Standard Dictionary divides it, like Gaul, into three parts, peculiarly interrelated, yet thinly divisible from each other:—(1) A remarkable or hazardous experience; an unexpected or exciting occurrence. (2) A hazardous or uncertain undertaking; a daring feat. (3) The encountering of risks; daring and hazardous enterprise.