ain of to-day, tearing over the metals,
grinds away fine particles of dust, grains so minute that a traveler
cannot detect them with the eye; but let a single one of those invisible
motes find its way into the kidneys, it will bring about that most
excruciating, and sometimes fatal, disease known as gravel. And our
society, rushing like a locomotive along its metaled track, is heedless
of the all but imperceptible dust made by the grinding of the wheels;
but it was otherwise with the two musicians; the invisible grains of
sand sank perpetually into the very fibres of their being, causing them
intolerable anguish of heart. Tender exceedingly to the pain of
others, they wept for their own powerlessness to help; and their
own susceptibilities were almost morbidly acute. Neither age nor the
continual spectacle of the drama of Paris life had hardened two souls
still young and childlike and pure; the longer they lived, indeed, the
more keenly they felt their inward suffering; for so it is, alas! with
natures unsullied by the world, with the quiet thinker, and with such
poets among the poets as have never fallen into any excess.

Since the old men began housekeeping together, the day's routine was
very nearly the same for them both. They worked together in harness
in the fraternal fashion of the Paris cab-horse; rising every morning,
summer and winter, at seven o'clock, and setting out after breakfast
to give music lessons in the boarding-schools, in which, upon occasion,
they would take lessons for each other. Towards noon Pons repaired to
his theatre, if there was a rehearsal on hand; but all his spare moments
were spent in sauntering on the boulevards. Night found both of them in
the orchestra at the theatre, for Pons had found a place for Schmucke,
and upon this wise.

At the time of their first meeting, Pons had just received that
marshal's baton of the unknown musical composer--an appointment as
conductor of an orchestra. It had come to him unasked, by a favor of
Count Popinot, a bourgeois hero of July, at that time a member of the
Government. Count Popinot had the license of a theatre in his gift,
and Count Popinot had also an old acquaintance of the kind that the
successful man blushes to meet. As he rolls through the streets of Paris
in his carriage, it is not pleasant to see his boyhood's chum down at
heel, with a coat of many improbable colors and trousers innocent of
straps, and a head full of soaring speculations