The pieces that he played were not all of equal merit, though I could not know that. Everything is good to a child in the springtime of sentiment. To this day I can not hear the overture to Poet and Peasant without emotion. One evening at Lucerne, by the lake side, the most ordinary of orchestras in the most ordinary of hotels began that overture. Around me men in dinner jackets and ladies in evening gowns went on chatting and laughing as if they heard nothing, as if they were deaf, yet I felt utterly alone, my heart melting and I thought I should weep. The orchestra was not playing for the public, it was playing for me alone, no longer the mediocre art of the Austrian composer, but the memory of my entrance as a child into the mysterious realm of sound and dreams, in the forest whose paths stretch away into the infinite. At the same period the singing of one of my school comrades quite overcame me. It was at a first communion service. I had not yet been admitted to the Holy Table and was at leisure to listen. He sang that melody of Gounod, _Heaven Has Visited the Earth_, and quite truly heaven was visiting me, taking me by storm, carrying me away. My whole enraptured being made a part of that song. The voice rose high, higher, it seemed that it must break, that it was not strong enough to bear up those mighty notes that filled all the chapel. It seemed like those tall fountains, so slender that the wind carries them away, so that they never fall to earth. That voice was indeed broken as the boy became a youth; death carried away my comrade in his sixteenth year. Then there was a music box that father had brought me from Milan whither he had been summoned for a consultation. When the screw was turned it gave forth soft, thin, somewhat quavering notes, and a little dancer would pirouette upon the cover. Gravely and in cadence with the music she would point her toes and take her position as if she were accomplishing a sacred rite, a sweet yet sad little spectacle. How many times have I been disenchanted in later years when I discovered that my partners in the ball were frivolous, when I had expected to find in them tender sweetness, that sacred sadness of the little dancer of my music box.