course of manufacture. I remember the tiny little hands that pushed
the coloured silks so nimbly through the cloth that was stretched on the
embroidery-frame,--the vast trouble I was put to to get a coloured copy
of my armorial bearings for the heraldic work which was to decorate the
front of the band,--the pursings up of the little mouth, and the
contractions of the young forehead, as their possessor plunged into a
profound sea of cogitation touching the way in which the cloud should be
represented from which the armed hand, that is my crest, issues,--the
heavenly moment when the tiny hands placed it on my head, in a position
that I could not bear for more than a few seconds, and I, kinglike,
immediately assumed my royal prerogative after the coronation, and
instantly levied a tax on my only subjects which was, however, not paid
unwillingly. Ah! the cap is there, but the embroiderer has fled; for
Atropos was severing the web of life above her head while she was
weaving that silken shelter for mine!

How uncouthly the huge piano that occupies the corner at the left of the
door looms out in the uncertain twilight! I neither play nor sing, yet I
own a piano. It is a comfort to me to look at it, and to feel that the
music is there, although I am not able to break the spell that binds it.
It is pleasant to know that Bellini and Mozart, Cimarosa, Porpora, Glueck
and all such,--or at least their souls,--sleep in that unwieldy case.
There lie embalmed, as it were, all operas, sonatas, oratorios,
nocturnos, marches, songs and dances, that ever climbed into existence
through the four bars that wall in melody. Once I was entirely repaid
for the investment of my funds in that instrument which I never use.
Blokeeta, the composer, came to see me. Of course his instincts urged
him as irresistibly to my piano as if some magnetic power lay within it
compelling him to approach. He tuned it, he played on it. All night
long, until the gray and spectral dawn rose out of the depths of the
midnight, he sat and played, and I lay smoking by the window listening.
Wild, unearthly, and sometimes insufferably painful, were the
improvisations of Blokeeta. The chords of the instrument seemed breaking
with anguish. Lost souls shrieked in his dismal preludes; the half-heard
utterances of spirits in pain, that groped at inconceivable distances
from anything lovely or harmonious, seemed to rise dimly up out of the
waves of sound that gathered under his h