t and failed in another--my sight
reading was not up to the high standard demanded. No wonder! Music
reversed, and my fingers mechanically playing could be hardly called a
fair sight-reading trial. Therefore, continued this implacable document,
I would sit for a year in silence watching other pupils receiving their
instruction. I was to be an _auditeur_, a listener--and all my musical
castles came tumbling about my ears!

What I did during that weary year of waiting cannot be told in one
article; suffice it to say I sat, I heard, I suffered. If music-students
of today experience kindred trials I pity them; but somehow or other I
fancy they do not. Luxury is longed for too much; young men and young
women will not make the sacrifices for art we oldsters did; and it all
shows in the shallow, superficial, showy, empty, insincere
pianoforte-playing of the day and hour.

XV

TONE VERSUS NOISE

The tropical weather in the early part of last month set a dozen
problems whizzing in my skull. Near my bungalow on the upper Wissahickon
were several young men, camping out for the summer. One afternoon I was
playing with great gusto a lovely sonata by Dussek--the one in
A-flat--when I heard laughter, and, rising, I went to the window in an
angry mood. Outside were two smiling faces, the patronizing faces of two
young men.

"Well!" said I, rather shortly.

"It was like a whiff from the eighteenth century," said a stout, dark
young fellow.

"A whiff that would dissipate the musical malaria of this," I cried, for
I saw I had musicians to deal with. There was hearty laughter at this,
and as young laughter warms the cockles of an old man's heart, I invited
the pair indoors, and over some bottled ale--I despise your new-fangled
slops--we discussed the Fine Arts. It is not the custom nowadays to
capitalize the arts, and to me it reveals the want of respect in this
headlong irreverent generation. To return to my mutton--to my sheep:
they told me they were pianists from New York or thereabouts, who had
conceived the notion of spending the summer in a tent.

"And what of your practising?" I slyly asked. Again they roared. "Why,
old boy, you must be behind the times. We use a dumb piano the most part
of the year, and have brought a three-octave one along." That set me
going. "So you spend your vacation with the dumb, expecting to learn to
speak, and yet you mock me because I play Dussek! Let me inform you, my
young sirs, that