From the time when 'Don Quixote' first opened my eyes to an imaginative world outside myself, I had read hungrily; but another world was also opened to me when I was about sixteen. I had been taught scales and exercises on the piano; I had tried to learn music, with very little success, when one day the head-master of the school asked me to go into his drawing-room and copy out something for him. As I sat there copying, the music-master, a German, came in and sat down at the piano. He played something which I had never heard before, something which seemed to me the most wonderful thing I had ever heard. I tried to go on copying, but I did not know what I was writing down; I was caught into an ecstasy, the sound seemed to envelop me like a storm, and then to trickle through me like raindrops shaken from wet leaves, and then to wrap me again in a tempest which was like a tempest of grief. When he had finished I said, 'Will you play that over again?' As he played it again I began to distinguish it more clearly; I heard a slow, heavy trampling of feet, marching in order, then what might have been the firing of cannon over a grave, and the trampling again. When he told me that it was Chopin's Funeral March, I understood why it was that the feet had moved so slowly, and why the cannon had been fired; and I saw that the melody which had soothed me was the timid, insinuating consolation which love or hope sometimes brings to the mourner. I asked him if he would teach me music and if he would teach me that piece. He promised to teach me that piece, and I learned it. I learned no more scales and exercises; I learned a few more pieces; but in a little while I could read at sight; and when I was not reading a book I was reading a piece of music at the piano. I never acquired the technique to play a single piece correctly, but I learned to touch the piano as if one were caressing a living being, and it answered me in an intimate and affectionate voice. Books and music, then, together with my solitary walks, were the only means of escape which I was able to find from the tedium of things as they were. I was passionately in love with life, but the life I lived was not the life I wanted. I did not know quite what I wanted, but I knew that what I wanted was something very different from what I endured. We were very poor, and I hated the constraints of poverty. We were surrounded by commonplace, middle-class people, and I hated commonplace and the middle classes. Sometimes we were too poor even to have a servant, and I was expected to clean my own boots. I could not endure getting my hands or my shirt-cuffs dirty; the thought of having to do it disgusted me every day. Sometimes my mother, without saying anything to me, had cleaned my boots for me. I was scarcely conscious of the sacrifices which she and the others were continually making. I made none, of my own accord, and I felt aggrieved if I had to share the smallest of their privations.