a peevish, fretful child. After the evening prayer, like
Millet, again, when his household were all abed, he would often walk out
into the night alone, and traverse his solitary way along a wintry road,
through the woods or by the winding river, a dim, misty, shadowy figure,
spectral as the "Sower," lonely as the "Fagot-Gatherer," talking to
himself, mayhap, and communing with his Maker.

In his later years, when he traveled from one village or city to another
to attend musical gatherings, he was always accompanied by one or more
of his sons. His ambition was centered on his children, and his hope was
in them. Yet nothing has been added to either organ-building,
organ-playing or composition for the organ since his time.

He never knew, any more than Shakespeare knew, that he had set a pace
that would never be equaled. He would have stood aghast with incredulity
had he been told that centuries would come and go and his name be
acclaimed as Master.

Such was Sebastian Bach--simple, polite, modest, unaffected, generous,
almost shy--doing his work and doing it as well as he could, living one
day at a time, loving his friends, forgetting his enemies. His heart was
filled with such melodies that their echo is a blessing and a
benediction to us yet. Art lives!

* * * * *

Heredity is that law of our being which provides that a man shall
resemble his grandfather--or not. The Bach family has supplied the
believers in heredity more good raw material in way of argument than any
dozen other families known to history, combined.

The Herschels with three eminent astronomers to their credit, or the
Beechers with half a dozen great preachers, are scarcely worth
mentioning when we remember the Bachs, who for two hundred fifty years
sounded the "A" for nearly all Germany.

The earliest known member of this musical family was Vert Bach, who was
born about Fifteen Hundred Fifty. He was a miller and baker by trade,
but devoted so much time to playing at dances, rehearsing at church
festivals, and attending gipsy musical performances, that in his milling
business he never prospered and nobody called him "Pillsbury."

This man had a son by the name of Hans, a weaver and a right merry
wight, who traveled over the country attending weddings, christenings
and such like festivals, playing upon a fiddle of his own construction.
So famous was Hans Bach that his name lives in legend and folklore,
wherein it i