He had the back entrance to the Wagner estate unlocked when I reached it and led the way around a mass of flowering bushes to the plain flat slab of marble without inscription under which the composer lies buried in his own back yard. But for the house fifty yards away it would have been easy to imagine oneself in the depth of a forest. The old gardener considered his fee earned when he had showed me the grave, and he answered my questions with cold brevity. He had held his present position for thirty-eight years. Of course he had known Herr Richard. Hadn’t he seen and talked with him every day for many years? No, there was nothing unusual about him. He was like any other rich man, except that he was always making music. It was plain that the gardener thought this a rather foolish hobby. He spoke of his former master with that slight tinge of scorn, mingled with considerable pride at the importance of his own position, which servants so often show in discussing employers whom the world considers famous, and changed the subject as soon as possible to the all-engrossing scarcity of food. Even Herr Siegfried and his family suffered from that, he asserted. He was still grumbling hungrily when he pocketed what pewter coins I had left and, locking the gate, shuffled back to his watering-pots. The outwardly ugly Wagner opera-house on a hillock at the farther end of town was as dismal in its abandonment as most cheap structures become that have stood five years unoccupied and unrepaired. There was nothing to recall the famous singers and the international throngs from kings to scrimping schoolma’ams from overseas, who had so often gathered here for the annual Wagner festival. A few convalescing soldiers lounged under the surrounding trees; from the graveled terrace one had an all-embracing view of Bayreuth and the rolling hills about it. But only a few twittering birds broke the silence of a spot that had so often echoed with the strident strains of all the musical instruments known to mankind.