Those who painfully and with bleeding feet have scaled the crags of mastery over musical instruments have yet their loss in this,--that the wild joy of strumming has become a vanished sense. Their happiness comes from the concord and the relative value of the notes they handle: the pure, absolute quality and nature of each note in itself are only appreciated by the strummer. For some notes have all the sea in them, and some cathedral bells; others a woodland joyance and a smell of greenery; in some fauns dance to the merry reed, and even the grave centaurs peep out from their caves. Some bring moonlight, and some the deep crimson of a rose's heart; some are blue, some red, and others will tell of an army with silken standards and march-music. And throughout all the sequence of suggestion, up above the little white men leap and peep, and strive against the imprisoning wires; and all the big rosewood box hums as it were full of hiving bees. Spent with the rapture, I paused a moment and caught my friend's eye over the edge of a folio. “But as for these Germans,” he began abruptly, as if we had been in the middle of a discussion, “the scholarship is there, I grant you; but the spark, the fine perception, the happy intuition, where is it? They get it all from us!” “They get nothing whatever from US,” I said decidedly: the word German only suggesting Bands, to which Aunt Eliza was bitterly hostile. “You think not?” he rejoined, doubtfully, getting up and walking about the room. “Well, I applaud such fairness and temperance in so young a critic. They are qualities--in youth--as rare as they are pleasing. But just look at Schrumpffius, for instance--how he struggles and wrestles with a simple γἁρ in this very passage here!” I peeped fearfully through the open door, half-dreading to see some sinuous and snark-like conflict in progress on the mat; but all was still. I saw no trouble at all in the passage, and I said so. “Precisely,” he cried, delighted. “To you, who possess the natural scholar's faculty in so happy a degree, there is no difficulty at all. But to this Schrumpffius--” But here, luckily for me, in came the housekeeper, a clean-looking woman of staid aspect. “Your tea is in the garden,” she said, as if she were correcting a faulty emendation. “I've put some cakes and things for the little gentleman; and you'd better drink it before it gets cold.” He waved her off and continued his stride, brandishing an aorist over my devoted head. The housekeeper waited unmoved till there fell a moment's break in his descant; and then, “You'd better drink it before it gets cold,” she observed again, impassively. The wretched man cast a deprecating look at me. “Perhaps a little tea would be rather nice,” he observed, feebly; and to my great relief he led the way into the garden. I looked about for the little gentleman, but, failing to discover him, I concluded he was absent-minded too, and attacked the “cakes and things” with no misgivings.