f lovingly over and got
ready to turn the pages.

The bride fetched a swoop with her fingers from one end of the keyboard
to the other, just to get her bearings, as it were, and you could see
the congregation set their teeth with the agony of it. Then, without
any more preliminaries, she turned on all the horrors of the "Battle of
Prague," that venerable shivaree, and waded chin-deep in the blood of
the slain. She made a fair and honorable average of two false notes in
every five, but her soul was in arms and she never stopped to correct.
The audience stood it with pretty fair grit for a while, but when the
cannonade waxed hotter and fiercer, and the discord average rose to
four in five, the procession began to move. A few stragglers held their
ground ten minutes longer, but when the girl began to wring the true
inwardness out of the "cries of the wounded," they struck their colors
and retired in a kind of panic.

There never was a completer victory; I was the only non-combatant left
on the field. I would not have deserted my countrywoman anyhow, but
indeed I had no desires in that direction. None of us like mediocrity,
but we all reverence perfection. This girl's music was perfection in its
way; it was the worst music that had ever been achieved on our planet by
a mere human being.

I moved up close, and never lost a strain. When she got through, I
asked her to play it again. She did it with a pleased alacrity and a
heightened enthusiasm. She made it ALL discords, this time. She got an
amount of anguish into the cries of the wounded that shed a new light on
human suffering. She was on the war-path all the evening. All the time,
crowds of people gathered on the porches and pressed their noses against
the windows to look and marvel, but the bravest never ventured in.
The bride went off satisfied and happy with her young fellow, when her
appetite was finally gorged, and the tourists swarmed in again.

What a change has come over Switzerland, and in fact all Europe, during
this century! Seventy or eighty years ago Napoleon was the only man in
Europe who could really be called a traveler; he was the only man who
had devoted his attention to it and taken a powerful interest in it; he
was the only man who had traveled extensively; but now everybody goes
everywhere; and Switzerland, and many other regions which were unvisited
and unknown remotenesses a hundred years ago, are in our days a buzzing
hive of restless str