"Je suis las des mois--je suis d'entendre Ce qui peut mentir; J'aime mieux les sons, qu'au lieu de comprendre je n'ai qu'a sentir." Next day I would buy or beg or borrow the music that had filled me with such emotion and delight, and take it home to my little square piano, and try to finger it all out for myself. But I had begun too late in life. To sit, longing and helpless, before an instrument one cannot play, with a lovely score one cannot read! Even Tantalus was spared such an ordeal as that. It seemed hard that my dear father and mother, so accomplished in music themselves, should not even have taught me the musical notes, at an age when it was so easy to learn them; and thus have made me free of that wonder-world of sound in which I took such an extraordinary delight, and might have achieved distinction--perhaps. But no, my father had dedicated me to the Goddess of Science from before my very birth; that I might some day be better equipped than he for the pursuit, capture, and utilization of Nature's sterner secrets. There must be no dallying with light Muses. Alas! I have fallen between two stools! And thus, Euterpe absent, her enchantment would pass away; her handwriting was before me, but I had not learned how to decipher it, and my weary self would creep back into its old prison--my soul. [Illustration: (no caption)] Self-sickness-_selbstschmerz, le mal do soi!_ What a disease! It is not to be found in any dictionary, medical or otherwise. I ought to have been whipped for it, I know; but nobody was big enough, or kind enough, to whip me! * * * * * At length there came a day when that weary, weak, and most ridiculous self of mine was driven out--and exorcised for good--by a still more potent enchanter than even Handel or Beethoven or Schubert! There was a certain Lord Cray, for whom Lintot had built some laborers' cottages in Hertfordshire, and I sometimes went there to superintend the workmen. When the cottages were finished, Lord Cray and his wife (a very charming, middle-aged lady) came to see them, and were much pleased with all that had been done, and also seemed to be much interested in _me_, of all people in the world! and a few days later I received a card of invitation to their house in town for a concert. At first I felt much too shy to go; but Mr. Lintot insisted that it was my duty to do so, as it might lead to business; so that when the night came, I screwed up my courage to the sticking-place, and went. That evening was all enchantment, or would have been but for the somewhat painful feeling that I was such an outsider.