thers of Wunsch's pupils sent him notes
informing him that their daughters would discontinue their
music-lessons. The old maid who had rented him her piano sent the town
dray for her contaminated instrument, and ever afterward declared that
Wunsch had ruined its tone and scarred its glossy finish. The Kohlers
were unremitting in their kindness to their friend. Mrs. Kohler made him
soups and broths without stint, and Fritz repaired the dove-house and
mounted it on a new post, lest it might be a sad reminder.

As soon as Wunsch was strong enough to sit about in his slippers and
wadded jacket, he told Fritz to bring him some stout thread from the
shop. When Fritz asked what he was going to sew, he produced the
tattered score of "Orpheus" and said he would like to fix it up for a
little present. Fritz carried it over to the shop and stitched it into
pasteboards, covered with dark suiting-cloth. Over the stitches he glued
a strip of thin red leather which he got from his friend, the
harness-maker. After Paulina had cleaned the pages with fresh bread,
Wunsch was amazed to see what a fine book he had. It opened stiffly, but
that was no matter.

Sitting in the arbor one morning, under the ripe grapes and the brown,
curling leaves, with a pen and ink on the bench beside him and the Gluck
score on his knee, Wunsch pondered for a long while. Several times he
dipped the pen in the ink, and then put it back again in the cigar box
in which Mrs. Kohler kept her writing utensils. His thoughts wandered
over a wide territory; over many countries and many years. There was no
order or logical sequence in his ideas. Pictures came and went without
reason. Faces, mountains, rivers, autumn days in other vineyards far
away. He thought of a FUSZREISE he had made through the Hartz Mountains
in his student days; of the innkeeper's pretty daughter who had lighted
his pipe for him in the garden one summer evening, of the woods above
Wiesbaden, haymakers on an island in the river. The roundhouse whistle
woke him from his reveries. Ah, yes, he was in Moonstone, Colorado. He
frowned for a moment and looked at the book on his knee. He had thought
of a great many appropriate things to write in it, but suddenly he
rejected all of them, opened the book, and at the top of the
much-engraved title-page he wrote rapidly in purple ink:--

EINST, O WUNDER!--

A. WUNSCH.
MOONSTONE, COLO.
SEPTEMBER 30, 18--

Nobody in Moonstone ever fo