ile the orchestra thumped their approval on their music racks. He had
been hailed even as the American Saint Saens, and it was small wonder
that he began to feel the wreath too tight a fit for his brows.

His family was well known and, from the first, society had claimed him
for her own. He had the gift of talking well, of dancing better; and he
had found it easy to drift along from day to day, neglecting his music
for the sake of the invitations that poured in upon him. In his more
conscientious moments, he told himself that he would do all the better
work as the result of seeing the life of his native city; but so far its
influence had been only potent to move him to write a triplet of light
songs and to dedicate them to three of the prettiest girls in his set, no
one of whom was able to sing a note in tune.

At the end of the second season, a reaction set in. The public was
clamorous for a new work from him; he was tired of being lionized by
people who called his beloved overture pretty. The madness of the spring
was upon him, the spirit of work had seized him, and the middle of May
found him and his long-suffering piano installed in the "north chamber"
of the Sykes homestead at Bannock Bars.

He had chosen the place with some degree of care, in order to be
sufficiently remote from society to work undisturbed, sufficiently near
civilization to be able to buy more music paper in case of need. Ten
miles of even a bad road is not an impassible barrier to an enthusiastic
bicyclist; yet the place was as rustic and countrified as if it had been,
not ten, but ten hundred miles from an electric light. His digestion was
good enough to cope even with Eulaly Sykes's perennial doughnuts, and it
was in a mood of supreme content that he settled into his quarters in the
wilderness. It was years since he had watched the on-coming of the New
England summer; he watched it now with the trained sense, the inherent
quickness of perception of the true artist who realizes that the simplest
facts of the day's routine by his touch can be transmuted into glowing,
vivid material for his work.

It must be confessed that Eulaly Sykes occasionally mourned to her
friends over the irregularities of her boarder. His hours of work
passed her comprehension, his work itself filled her soul with wonder
and disgust. In his moments of inspiration when he was evoking the
stormy chords of the introduction to his symphonic poem, _Bisesa_ he
never dreamed