on the
community as such. A filmy visitant from Elsewhere had grazed his
forehead and whispered in his ear that the town allotted to him by
destiny was crude, alike in its deficiencies and in its affirmations,
and that complete satisfaction for him lay altogether in another and
riper quarter.

Perhaps it was some such discontent as this that led him in the
direction of musical composition--or toward attempts at it. He had no
adequate preparation for it, nor, so far as I could perceive, any
justificatory call. He had once taken a few terms on the piano; and he
had on his shelves a few elementary works on harmony; and he had in his
fingertips a certain limited knack for improvisation; and he had once
sketched out, rather haltingly, a few simple songs. Yet, all the same,
another reservoir, one of uncertain depth and capacity, was opening up
for him at an age when opening-up was the continuing and dominating
feature of one's days--a muse was stirring the vibrant air about him;
and I gathered, after two or three certain visits to his house, that he
had embarked on some composition or other of an ambitious and
comprehensive nature: a cantata, possibly, or even some higher flight.
As he had never domesticated musical theory and musical notation in his
brain, most of his composing had to be carried on at the keyboard
itself. The big piano in the big open drawing-room resounded with his
strumming experiments in melody and harmony--sounds intelligible, often
enough, to no ears but his own, and not always agreeable to them. I am
sure he tried his parents' patience cruelly. His reiterated phrases and
harmonizings were audible throughout a good part of the house. They did
nothing toward relieving his mother's headaches, nothing toward raising
his father's hopes that, pretty soon, he would come to grips with the
elements of Loans and Discounts. Even the servants, setting the table,
now and again closed the dining-room door.

"Oh, Raymond, Raymond; _not_ to-day!" his mother would sometimes plead.

I presume that, during this period, the diary was still going on; and no
one with such a gift for writing will stop short at a diary. In fact,
Raymond tried his hand at a few short stories--still another muse was
fluttering about his temples. Most of these stories came back; but a few
of them got printed obscurely in mangled form, and the failure of the
venturesome periodicals sometimes deprived him of the honorarium (as
pay was then pom