His low voice and the first three slow notes rose together. The minor quality suggested lamentation. A short passage, rapidly chanted without accompaniment, made the hearts of the listeners beat a little faster. Then voice and instrument clashed together; both whirled nearer, until, all at once,--silence! The player looked about the room in bewilderment. He stared down upon the biwa. He closed his eyes and swayed slightly backward, then forward, then back again. Suddenly he reopened his eyes. They were larger, more brilliant; they flashed a new fire, the glare of battle reflected in their depths. Words now came rapidly. His sentences fell of themselves into long, unstable rhythms. Cadences were lacking. All phrasing, except in rarest intervals, broke into the air with a sob, a sigh, a shuddering gasp. Often now the biwa strings were slashed across by the ivory plectrum, and the human wail rang through vibrating response. Then voice and strings plunged into a seeming discord, a frantic wrack of sound exorcised an instant later by pure calm notes struck separately, like the drip of slow water. In the sense of Western harmony there was none, but something in the weird vibrations of long notes, the intricacies of overtone, and, above all, the unbelievable subtleties of rhythm, gave to one eager American listener, at least, her first insight into a new world of sound. "They are nearer in this, as in all their other arts, to nature," she thought to herself. "They summon the very essences of being, and find skeins for entangling them. Without conscious representation, they suggest to the human ear the lisp of sea winds, the flutter of fire, the rushing monologue of mountain streams. They hear sounds we Westerners never hear. I believe the very mists are audible." As the emotion increased and the subject became more martial, the time of the music grew rapid, broken, syncopated, involved. Soft, melodious passages shattered into jarring notes. Like European troubadours of France, or the meistersingers of mediæval Germany, he yielded himself to the unconscious swing of impulse, and sang what was given him. Lines shortened. Syllables became more staccato. It was dramatic, undidactic--the deeds rather than the thoughts of men. His diction became more simple and direct, with sharp, incisive verbs at the end that rang like smitten steel. His whole body, at times, was shaken. After some terrific passage, while the sobbing lute-strings sustained the passion, his body would bend over and down, as if, in its abandonment to joy, grief, or battle ardor, it would hug the instrument that had become its soul. Now he sang of the hero youth, Atsumori, of his insistence upon honorable death at the hand of his conqueror, Kumagayé. "The Hour of the Hare comes at last, and the red sun advances, Raised like a cry and a shield in the mists of the morning,