feelings, hopes, and fears and
thoughts, painted the picture, and that in seeing it we also saw
him--that a consciousness, if possible, yet more keen and vivid produced
the combinations of sound which brought tears to our eyes when we heard
"the band"--beautiful abstraction--play them! Certainly we never
considered the performers as anything more than people who could
play--one who blew his breath into a brass tube; another into a wooden
pipe; one who scraped a small fiddle with fine strings, another who
scraped a big one with coarse strings.

I was seventeen, and not having an original mind, had up to now judged
things from earlier teachings and impressions. I do not ask to be
excused. I only say that I was ignorant as ever even a girl of seventeen
was. I did not know the amount of art and culture which lay among those
rather shabby-looking members of the Elberthal _staedtische Kapelle_--did
not know that that little cherubic-faced man, who drew his bow
so lovingly across his violin, had played under Mendelssohn's
conductorship, and could tell tales about how the master had drilled his
band, and what he had said about the first performance of the
"Lobgesang." The young man to whom I had seen Courvoisier speaking
was--I learned it later--a performer to ravish the senses, a conductor
in the true sense--not a mere man who waves the stick up and down, but
one who can put some of the meaning of the music into his gestures and
dominate his players. I did not know that the musicians before me were
nearly all true artists, and some of them undoubted gentlemen to boot,
even if their income averaged something under that of a skilled
Lancashire operative. But even if I had known it as well as possible,
and had been aware that there could be nothing derogatory in my knowing
or being known by one of them, I could not have been more wretched than
I was in having been, as it were, false to a friend. The dreadful thing
was, or ought to be--I could not quite decide which--that such a person
should have been my friend.

"How he must despise me!" I thought, my cheeks burning, my eyes fastened
upon the play-bill. "I owe him ten shillings. If he likes he can
point me out to them all and say, 'That is an English girl--lady I
can not call her. I found her quite alone and lost at Koeln, and I did
all I could to help her. I saved her a great deal of anxiety and
inconvenience. She was not above accepting my assistance; she confided
her story