Then a gypsy-like little individual, wiry and unkempt, who looks as if he had spent his life listening to the voices of the night in Heaven knows what Lithuanian forests, with wolves and wild-boars for his familiars, and the wind in the trees for his teacher, seats himself at the great brass-bound oaken Broadwood piano-forte. And under his phenomenal fingers, a haunting, tender, world-sorrow, full of questionings--a dark mystery of moonless, starlit nature--exhales itself in nocturnes, in impromptus, in preludes--in mere waltzes and mazourkas even! But waltzes and mazourkas such as the most frivolous would never dream of dancing to. A capricious, charming sorrow--not too deep for tears, if one be at all inclined to shed them--so delicate, so fresh, and yet so distinguished, so ethereally civilized and worldly and well-bred that it has crystallized itself into a drawing-room ecstasy, to last forever. It seems as though what was death (or rather euthanasia) to him who felt it, is play for us--surely an immortal sorrow whose recital will never, never pall--the sorrow of Chopin. Though why Chopin should have been so sorry we cannot even guess; for mere sorrow's sake, perhaps; the very luxury of woe--the real sorrow which has no real cause (like mine in those days); and that is the best and cheapest kind of sorrow to make music of, after all! And this great little gypsy pianist, who plays his Chopin so well; evidently he has not spent his life in Lithuanian forests, but hard at the key-board, night and day; and he has had a better master than the wind in the trees--namely, Chopin himself (for it is printed in the programme). It was his father and mother before him, and theirs, who heard the voices of the night; but he remembers it all, and puts it all into his master's music, and makes us remember it, too. Or else behold the chorus, rising tier upon tier, and culminating in the giant organ. But their thunder is just hushed. Some Liliputian figure, male or female, as the case may be, rises on its little legs amid the great Liliputian throng, and through the sacred stillness there peals forth a perfect voice (by no means Liliputian). It bids us "Rest in the Lord," or else it tells us that "He was despised and rejected of men"; but, again, what matter the words? They are almost a hinderance, beautiful though they be. The hardened soul melts at the tones of the singer, at the unspeakable pathos of the sounds that cannot lie; one almost believes--one believes at least in the belief of others. At last one understands, and is purged of intolerance and cynical contempt, and would kneel with the rest, in sheer human sympathy!