tuated the stillness.

"Ah, Mozart is _so_ easy! Try something else!" And then I made my second
mistake. I arose and, bowing to the invisible one in the gloom, I said:
"That, was _not_ Mozart, but Beethoven." There was an explosion of
laughter, formidable, brutal. The feminine voice rose above it all in
irritating accents.

"Impertinent! And what a silly beard he has!" I sat down in despair,
plucking at my fluffy chin-whiskers and wondering if they looked as
frivolous as they felt.

Nudged from dismal reverie, I saw the colorless professor with a music
book in his hand. He placed it on the piano-desk and mumbled: "Very
indifferent. Read this at sight." Puzzled by the miserable light, the
still more wretched typography, I peered at the notes as peers a miser
at the gold he is soon to lose. No avail. My vision was blurred, my
fingers leaden. Suddenly I noticed that, whether through malicious
intent or stupid carelessness, the book was upside down. Now, I knew my
Bach fugues, if I may say it, backward. Something familiar about the
musical text told me that before me, inverted, was the _C-sharp Major
Prelude_ in the first book of the _Well-tempered Clavichord_.
Mechanically my fingers began that most delicious and light-hearted of
caprices--I did not dare to touch the music--and soon I was rattling
through it, all my thoughts three thousand miles away in a little Ohio
town. When I had finished I arose in grim silence, took the music, held
it toward the chief executioner, and said:

"And upside down!"

There was another outburst, and again that woman's voice was heard:

"What a comedian is this young Yankee!"

I left the stage without bowing, jostled the stupid doorkeeper, and fled
through the room where the other numbers huddled like sheep for the
slaughter. Seizing my hat I went out into the rain, and when the
concierge tried to stop me I shook a threatening fist at him. He stepped
back in a fine hurry, I assure you. When I came to my senses I found
myself on my bed, my head buried in the pillows. Luckily I had no
mirror, so I was spared the sight of my red, mortified face. That night
I slept as if drugged.

In the morning a huge envelope with an official seal was thrust through
a crack in my door--there were many--and in it I found a notification
that I was accepted as a pupil of the Paris _Conservatoire_. What a
dream realized! But only to be shattered, for, so I was further
informed, I had succeeded in one tes