met fully. I do not know what I felt when I saw him look at me as
unrecognizingly as if I had been a wooden doll in a shop window. Was he
looking past me? No. His eyes met mine direct--glance for glance; not a
sign, not a quiver of the mouth, not a waver of the eyelids. I heard no
more of the overture. When he was playing, and so occupied with his
music, I surveyed him surreptitiously; when he was not playing, I kept
my eyes fixed firmly upon my play-bill. I did not know whether to be
most distressed at my own disloyalty to a kind friend, or most appalled
to find that the man with whom I had spent a whole afternoon in the firm
conviction that he was outwardly, as well as inwardly, my equal and a
gentleman--(how the tears, half of shame, half of joy, rise to my eyes
now as I think of my poor, pedantic little scruples then!) the man of
whom I had assuredly thought and dreamed many and many a time and oft
was--a professional musician, a man in a band, a German band, playing in
the public orchestra of a provincial town. Well! well!

In our village at home, where the population consisted of clergymen's
widows, daughters of deceased naval officers, and old women in general,
and those old women ladies of the genteelest description--the Army and
the Church (for which I had been brought up to have the deepest
veneration and esteem, as the two head powers in our land--for we did
not take Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool into account at
Skernford)--the Army and the Church, I say, look down a little upon
Medicine and the Law, as being perhaps more necessary, but less select
factors in that great sum--the Nation, Medicine and the Law looked down
very decidedly upon commercial wealth, and Commerce in her turn turned
up her nose at retail establishments, while one and all--Church and
Army, Law and Medicine, Commerce in the gross and Commerce in the
little--united in pointing the finger at artists, musicians, literati,
_et id omne genus_, considering them, with some few well-known and
orthodox exceptions, as bohemians, and calling them "persons." They were
a class with whom we had and could have nothing in common; so utterly
outside our life that we scarcely ever gave a thought to their
existence. We read of pictures, and wished to see them; heard of musical
wonders, and desired to hear them--as pictures, as compositions. I do
not think it ever entered our heads to remember that a man with a quick
life throbbing in his veins, with