dled for
you in your cradle. At the moment I realized who you were, you were so
much a part of my music that you only appealed to me through that. But
when I left you, I carried a consciousness of you with me that was
more tangible. I had held your hand in mine. I feel it there still.

"I went directly to my room, alone. I sat down immediately to
transcribe as much of what I had played as possible while it was
fresh in my mind. As I wrote I was alone with you. But as the spirit
of the music was imprisoned, I knew that you were becoming more and
more a material presence to me. When I slept, it was to dream of you
again--but, oh, the difference!

"I should have been grateful to you for the inspiration that you had
been to me--and I was! But it had served its purpose. They tell me I
never played like that before. I feel I never shall again. But the end
of an emotion is never in the spirit with me.

"I started out this afternoon to find you, oblivious of the fact that
I should have left town. I had the audacity to tell myself that I
should be a cad if I departed without thanking the sweet daughter of
your mother for her share in making me great. I had the presumption to
believe in myself. It seemed natural enough to your good father that
'a whimsical genius,' as he called me, should be allowed the caprice
of even tardily looking up his boyhood's acquaintance. He received me
nobly, was proud that you should see I remembered him--and simply made
no secret of it.

"Though I knew what you had seemed to me, I little realized that the
child of true, fine musical spirits had a nature strung like my
Strad--fine, clear, true, matchless, as well as inspiring. I spent a
beautiful afternoon with you. I cannot better explain than by saying
that to me it was like such a day as I have sometimes had with my
violin. I call them my holy-days, and God knows I try to keep them
holy,--though after too many of them follow a St. Michael and the
Dragon tussle--and I mean no discredit to the Archangel, either.

"The honest old father, proud to trust his daughter to me,--in his
kind heart he always considered me a most maligned man,--went off to
the play and his Saturday night club. He told me that.

"We were alone together. It was then that I began to think that I
could probably play on her nature as I did on my violin, and then,
with a player's frenzy, to realize that I had been doing it from the
first; that we had vibrated in harmony like