There is only one Lord in the world,
Our Lord Jesus Christ, and there are two lesser lords, Galileo and
Beethoven.'"

The musician looked lovingly at the plaster bust which faced the room
from one corner, with its leonine brows and the diffident eyes of a
deaf person.

"I do not know much about Galileo," continued Don Luis. "I know that
he was a very wise man, and a scientific genius. I am only a musician
and I know very little about other things, but I adore Beethoven,
and I think my little father did the same--he is a god; the most
extraordinary man the world has ever produced. Don't you think so,
Gabriel?"

His nerves were quivering with his excitement, and getting up, he
walked rapidly up and down the room, trampling on all the loose sheets
of music.

"Ay! how I envy you, Gabriel, having travelled so much, and having
heard so many good things! The other night I could not sleep for
thinking of all you had told me about your life in Paris--those
beautiful Sunday afternoons when you would go to the Lamoureax
concerts, or sometimes to Colonnas, giving yourself a surfeit of
sublimity! And here am I, shut up, my only hope being perhaps to
conduct a Mass of Rossini's at one of the great festivals! My only
comfort is to read music, instructing myself thoroughly in those great
works that so many fools in the towns can listen to half asleep and
bored. Here I have, in this pile, the nine symphonies of the great
man--his innumerable sonatas, his masses, and together with him,
Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, in fact all the great writers. I have even
Wagner. I read them, and I play what is possible on the harmonium.
But--it is just as if you were to describe the drawing and colours of
a picture to a blind man, buried in this cloister. I know, blindly,
that there are most beautiful things in this world--for those who can
hear them."

The Chapel-master kept from the previous year the remembrance of a
great happiness, and he spoke of it enthusiastically. He had been
chosen by the Cardinal Archbishop to go to Madrid, to be one of a
board of examiners for organists.

"That was the best time I ever had in my life, Gabriel. One evening
I listened to Wagner, dressed in the clothes of a friend of mine, a
violinist, who plays here in Toledo at the great festivals. I heard
the Walkyria in the pit of the Real Theatre, another night I went to
a concert; but the greatest night of all was the one on which I heard
the Ninth Symphony of t