omen passed at his feet
radiant, guilty, white, glittering and powerless. Lenyard felt the
inertia of sickness seize him when he saw the capital expression upon
these futile faces--the expression of insurgent souls that see for the
last time their conqueror. Not a sign made these mystic brides, not a
sound; and, as in the blazing music they dashed despairingly down the
gulf of time, Lenyard was left with eyes strained, pulses jangled,
lonely and hopeless. He shivered, and his heart halted....

"This is the death of love," shouted Neshevna. But Lenyard heard her
not; nor did he hear the noise of the people beneath--the veritable
booming of primordial gorilla-men. And now a corrosive shaft of tone
rived the building as though its walls had been of gauze and went
hissing towards Paris, in shape a menacing sword. Like the clattering of
tumbrils in narrow, stony streets men and women trampled upon each
other, fleeing from the accursed altar of this arch-priest of
Beelzebub--Illowski. They over-streamed the sides of Montmartre, as ants
washed away by water. And the howling of them was heard by the watchers
in the doomed city below.

Neshevna, her arm clutched by Lenyard's icy fingers, shook him
violently, and tried to release herself. Finding this impossible she
dragged her silent burden out upon the crumpling balcony.

Paris was draped in flaming clouds--the blood-red smoke of mad torches.
Tongues of fire twined about the towers of Notre Dame; where the Opera
once stood yawned a blackened hole. The air was shocked by fulminate
blasts--the signals of the careless Scheff.

And the woman, her mouth filled with exultant laughter, screamed, "Thou
hast conquered, O Pavel Illowski!"

AN EMOTIONAL ACROBAT

They were tears which he drummed.

--HEINE.

Perhaps you think because I play upon an instrument of percussion I
admire that other percussive machine of wood and wire, the piano, or
consider the tympanum an inferior instrument?

You were never more mistaken, for I despise the piano as a shallow
compromise between the harp, tympani and those Eastern tinkling
instruments of crystal and glass, or dulcimers and cymbalum. It has no
character, no individuality of its own. It is deplorable in conjunction
with an orchestra, for its harsh, hard, unmalleable tone never blends
with other instruments. It is a selfish instrument and it makes selfish
artists of those who devote a lifetime to it.

Bah! I hate you and