stopped at the border of the three countries
through which it passed. When the coffin was taken to the grave in
Bayreuth, it was followed by the two large dogs that had shared, as so
many of their fellows, the goodness of his large heart.

As for the widow, she is still living as I write, and still unwearied
in behalf of his glory. In her he had found that ideal of womankind
which he had so much upheld: instant and dauntless obedience to the
behest of the one great love. When he died he was even then at work
upon a glorification of the sex, and the last sentence that ever flowed
from his pen related to a legend of the Buddhists, granting women a
right to the saintliness previously claimed by men alone.

Once he had written: "Women are the music of life," and of his
"Bruennhilde" he had said: "Never has woman been so glorified as in this
poem." For the reward of this trust in womankind, he had also had the
privilege of saying, "In the hearts of women it has always gone well
with my art."

And in his grave, where he lay, his head rested upon the long blonde
tresses of Cosima, which he had so admired, and which, with final
sacrifice, and as a last tribute, she had sacrificed to bury with him.

CHAPTER III.

TSCHAIKOVSKI, THE WOMAN-DREADER

Had his relations with music been as completely original as his
relations with women, there would be less dispute as to the genius of
this man whom the Germans call a Russian; the Russians, a German. He
was the son of a well-to-do mining and military engineer, who believed
in marriage and made three wives happy--in succession. The young
Tschaikovski was late, like Wagner, in deciding on music, and was
twenty-three before he took up instrumentation.

He was of a passionate nature, but his temper usually struck inward,
and his friend Kashkin said that he "never began a quarrel or defended
himself when attacked." That is not, I believe, a type to fascinate
women for long, and Tschaikovski's moroseness, which bordered on
morbidness and always hovered on the brink of insanity, made it perhaps
fortunate for at least two women that his negotiations with them ended
as they did. And so he drifted--not such a bachelor as Beethoven, yet
quite as wifeless. Unlike Beethoven, who turned from one disappointing
woman to another, Tschaikovski turned to men. Among his friends was
Nikolai Rubinstein, the brother of the more famous pianist, Anton.

Now, Nikolai, like Anton, had tried marria