re the smallest scratch or blur on any work of real
art.

Lydia felt a little less bitter and hopeless about life when she sat in
front of her own open fire, after her usual twilight walk. It was her
habit to wander down the wooded road after her simple five-o'clock
supper, gatherings ferns or goldenrod or frost flowers for her vases;
and one night she heard, above the rippling of the river, the strange,
sweet, piercing sound of Anthony Croft's violin.

She drew nearer, and saw a middle-aged man sitting in the kitchen
doorway, with a lad of ten or twelve years leaning against his knees.
She could tell little of his appearance, save that he had a high
forehead, and hair that waved well back from it in rather an unusual
fashion. He was in his shirt-sleeves, but the gingham was scrupulously
clean, and he had the uncommon refinement of a collar and necktie. Out
of sight herself, Lyddy drew near enough to hear; and this she did every
night without recognizing that the musician was blind. The music had
a curious effect upon her. It was a hitherto unknown influence in her
life, and it interpreted her, so to speak, to herself. As she sat on
the bed of brown pine needles, under a friendly tree, her head resting
against its trunk, her eyes half closed, the tone of Anthony's violin
came like a heavenly message to a tired, despairing soul. Remember that
in her secluded life she had heard only such harmony as Elvira Reynolds
evoked from her piano or George Reynolds from his flute, and the
Reynolds temperament was distinctly inartistic.

Lyddy lived through a lifetime of emotion in these twilight concerts.
Sometimes she was filled with an exquisite melancholy from which there
was no escape; at others, the ethereal purity of the strain stirred her
heart with a strange, sweet vision of mysterious joy; joy that she had
never possessed, would never possess; joy whose bare existence she never
before realized. When the low notes sank lower and lower with their soft
wail of delicious woe, she bent forward into the dark, dreading that
something would be lost in the very struggle of listening; then, after
a, pause, a pure human tone would break the stillness, and soaring,
bird-like, higher and higher, seem to mount to heaven itself, and,
"piercing its starry floors," lift poor scarred Lydia's soul to the very
grates of infinite bliss. In the gentle moods that stole upon her in
those summer twilights she became a different woman, softer in h