was not a noble and manly one, and I dare say a very happy one, too. Surely, hardly any greater blessing can befall either man or woman than to have found and loved an ideal, and then to have had it removed while still wholly noble, and before any experience had come to prove it was but a poor actual after all, and before any hateful discovery had marred the perfect sincerity of worship. I do not know whether this sounds cruel, but it seems true to me; at least I can not think of any worse fate than to have given one's self wholly in perfect faith to an ideal which one day had collapsed, and stained everything else in life with the dust of its miserable fragments." Nobody ever knew who it was that spoke: some thought it was Beatrice, others maintained it must have been the Romancer.

The next day, before they were fairly awake in the morning, the passengers of the Bavaria knew that they were running into a storm. During the night the motion of the vessel had gradually increased, and by the time it was daylight she was rolling heavily, and the dark green water was above the port-holes half the time. Below, the timbers creaked and groaned, things that were hung against the wall stood out straight with an apparently ridiculous disregard of the law of gravitation, the crockery rattled, the stewards stumbled heavily against the partitions as they made their way along the gangways, the big portmanteaus chased the little ones all over the floor, and every now and then a great echoing blow drowned every other sound, as a mountain of water came thundering over the bows and went switching along the deck over the heads of the scared passengers in their berths. To get up was to face certain wretchedness; and so everybody lay in bed, with or without good cause, until late in the morning. The whole day was a miserable one; but in one way or another it passed, and the, weather moderating a little at night, the party, who now sought each other out and clung together like magnetic particles, were

seated in a compact group in a corner of the companion-way stairs. "One thing is quite certain," Beatrice was saying, "and that is, we will not have another ghost-story. We have had three tales, and three ghosts, and another in such dreadful weather as this would be more than anybody could bear." "There is only one person,' remarked the Tragedian, "whom I feel I can thoroughly depend upon to carry out your wishes. Come," he added, turning toward the Editor, "give us a tale of love, or music." "Or both," put in the Romancer. And with the promptitude which distinguishes his craft, and the chivalry which is his personal characteristic, the Editor did.

THE ACTION TO THE WORD.

BY WALTER HERRIES POLLOCK.

ONE of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the social pleasures of my life has been derived from the hours I have been privileged to spend with my dear old friend and teacher, Von Carus, the violinist. The public knows him as a master of his art to a certain extent, and he has always been a favorite with them; but his success and his reputation have never been of the kind that his qualities should have commanded. Here and there only will you find a true lover of music who, when this or that great name of a violin-magician is cited, will say half to himself if there be no sympathetic soul by his side, "Yes, a fine player; but nothing to Von Carus, if the public did but know it." "Say rather," I have heard another amateur add, "if he would but let the public know it."

It is far from me to assert that the public was in the wrong in this matter-almost as far as to assert that Von Carus was in the wrong. All who have followed the notes as true critics must have observed and have been puzzled by such cases of mutual misunderstanding be

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tween artist and audience. Sometimes it comes from what a French critic has called "émotions qui ne dépassent point la rampe," and that the case is, I fear, frequent, and grievous at least to the artist. With Von Carus it was not so; the public felt his emotion, and wondered that it did not touch them more nearly; he felt that there was something wanting in his contact with them, and—but I am trying vainly to describe what no description of mine can compass, and must fall back. on simple statement of fact derived from what I have seen and heard. The large musical, really musical public-the public of the gallery when Italian opera was an institution in England, and of the orchestra in St. James's Hall now-said among each other, "This is wonderful playing; why does it not touch us?" The clever-stupid public of the stalls—the University young men and young women who had caught the cant of music and knew one hair's-breadth of it from the intellectual side-said, "Admirable execution, but he can't touch So-and-so's music," and, so saying, gave a half sigh, half snort, which expressed extraordinary acquaintance with modern common-room talk, and fell gracefully back into their chairs. Musicians simply wondered. I, whose sole claim to the title of musician is due to the instruction of Von Carus himself, wondered with them, but have wondered somewhat less since I heard one of the many stories he has told me as friend to friend, not as teacher to pupil.

He took few pupils-I can not get away from his fascinating "personality," as the modern school has it— and with those few he was not apt to be content. I think he approved of me merely because I had fathomed the depth of my own ignorance, and came to him feeling that, if I were capable of learning at all, I should learn from him more of the heart of the mystery of music than years of the conventional teaching I had already partly acquired could give me.

"It is already something," he would say to me in the days of our first acquaintance, "to know that you know nothing of this wonderful thing called music. It has taken me more than half a lifetime to find that out, and you-you know it by instinct; and what is more wonderful, the teaching of the schools has not deprived you of your instinct. Therefore, out of my

own ignorance I will give you whatever hint I can to the finding of the secrets of harmony and melody. Do not tell me " (I had not) "that the two can be separate for the Spirit of Music." Then he would smoke silently, and then he would give me a lesson profound in knowledge, brilliant in illustration, burning with life and passion. And then he would fall to smoking again, and say with a half-assumed sadness, "But all this it is no good to talk to the amateur who wants to find the royal road, that exists as much as the road to King Solomon's mines exists. And all this, well! well! I can not express to the great public, that, say what you will, is after