Our rooms were on the ground-floor of a one-story cottage. A little distance off was the large hotel, to which the cottage was attached by a long arcade or covered gallery. We could hear fragments of the music which the band was playing to the gay idlers who were wandering about the balconies or through the hotel grounds; while laughs and little shrieks, uttered by the children as their pursuing nurses caught them up for bed, mingled not unpleasantly with the silvery hum arising from the fashionable crowd and the festal clang of the instruments. Sleep half hovered over, half winged off from the pillow. I fanned the peacock plumes slowly to and fro in the delicious air, gazed with a suppressed sigh on the darkening West, and repeated with a rhythmical beat the beautiful Hebrew poem in Ecclesiasticus, which I had so often recited through many long years by the side of that sick-bed, to soothe the ear of the sufferer. I had just reached these lines,-- "A present remedy of all Is the speeding coming of a cloud, And a dew that meeteth it, By the heat that cometh, Shall overpower it. "At His word the wind is still; And with His thought He appeaseth the deep; And the Lord hath plumed islands therein,"-- when I noticed that sleep had settled firmly on the dark eyelids, and the panting breath came through the poor clay in little soughs and sighs, as if body and soul, tired with combat, had each sunk down for a momentary rest on the weary battle-field of life. The music of the band had ceased; the gay crowd had withdrawn into the hotel to prepare for the entertainments of the evening, and there was a lull of human sounds. Then arose the grand roar of the ocean, which with the regular break of the billows on the beach beneath the cliff made the theme where before it had played the bass. I crept stealthily out of the bed-room, and, after exchanging my travelling-gown for a cool white robe, stretched my tired body on the lounge in the anteroom. There I lay with cold finger-tips pressed against burning eyelids, and icy palms holding with a firm grasp throbbing temples, under which flowed the hot, seething tide of mortal anguish, anxiety, and aching love. Some one touched me on the shoulder. I looked up. It was Max who was standing beside me. "There is a great musical treat for you," he said in a low voice. "The A---- Society is here, and also part of B----'s Opera Troupe, with Madame C----, and D----, the great tenor. The troupe and society united are to give such a concert as rarely falls to the lot of mortals to hear. I never saw a better programme. Look!"