It was in Corsica, at Ajaccio. In gratitude for a handful of sugar-plums, some small boys of the neighbourhood came one day and serenaded me. Quite unexpectedly, in gusts of untutored harmony, strange sounds of rare sweetness reached my ears. I ran to the window. There stood the orchestra, none taller than a jack-boot, gathered solemnly in a ring, with the leader in the middle. Most of them had at their lips a green onion-stem, distended spindlewise; others a stubble straw, a bit of reed not yet hardened by maturity. They blew into these, or rather they sang a vocero, to a grave measure, perhaps a relic of the Greeks. Certainly, it was not music as we understand it; still less was it a meaningless noise; but it was a vague, undulating melody, abounding in artless irregularities, a medley of pretty sounds in which the sibilations of the straw threw into relief the bleating of the swollen stalks. I stood amazed at the onion-stem symphony. Very much so must the shepherds of the eclogue have gone to work, avena tenui; very much so must the bridal epithalamium have been sung in the Reindeer period. Yes, the simple melody of my Corsican youngsters, a real humming of Bees on the rosemaries, has left a lasting trace in my memory. I can hear it now. It taught me the value of the rustic pipes, once so constantly celebrated in a literature that is now old-fashioned. How far removed are we from those simple joys! To charm the populace in these days you need ophicleides, saxhorns, trombones, cornets, every imaginable sort of brass, with big drums and little drums and, to beat time, a gun-shot. That’s what progress does. Three-and-twenty centuries ago, Greece assembled at Delphi for the festivals of the sun, Phœbus with the golden locks. Thrilled with religious emotion she listened to the Hymn of Apollo, a melody of a few lines, barely supported here and there by a scanty chord on the flute and cithara. Hailed as a masterpiece, the sacred song was engraved on marble tablets which the archæologists have recently exhumed. The venerable strains, the oldest in musical records, have been heard in my time in the ancient theatre at Orange, a ruin in stone worthy of that ruin of sound. I was not present at the performance, being kept away by my habit of running to the west whenever there are fireworks in the east. One of my friends, a man gifted with a very sensitive ear, went; and he said to me afterwards: “There were probably ten thousand people forming the audience in the enormous amphitheatre. I very much doubt whether one of them understood that music of another age. As for me, I felt as if I were listening to a blind man’s plaintive ditty and I looked round involuntarily for the dog holding the cup.”