rranean,
its young captain died, leaving behind him in Russia a fragile wife and
a little son who had inherited the name and character of the Thayers,
curiously mingled with the artistic, emotional temperament and the rare
musical ability of his mother's race.

It was no common combination. Russian art and Puritan morals are equally
grim; yet the one yields to every passing emotion, the other is girded
up by unyielding strength. Throughout his little boyhood, the child's
nature seemed borne hither and thither by these two counter currents in
his blood, now passing days of quiet, sturdy self-control, now swept by
black gusts of passion which carried all things before them. Then, four
years after his father's death, there came two events into his life: his
mother's death, and the discovery that he had a voice. The one taught
him the meaning of utter, absolute loneliness, for the alien blood of
the Thayers had never been able to win many friends in the land of his
mother's kin. The other proved to be at once a rudder to guide him over
the uncharted future of his life, and an outlet for the pent-up passion
within him. His voice was totally untrained, and as yet it broke into
all manner of distressing falsetto fragments. Nevertheless, it gave him
a cause for living, and it enabled him, the descendant of a taciturn
race, to give utterance to the doubts and questionings which accompanied
his growth to manhood. Bereft of his mother and without his voice, he
might easily have become an ascetic or a criminal.

To a boy of sixteen, trained to a life of strict economy, his slight
income from his father's investments seemed enough for his needs, and he
felt a boyish disgust when, one day, word came to him that his
grandfather had died, leaving him the only heir to the large property
laid up by eight generations of Thayers. His grandfather had refused to
become reconciled to his son; then why should he assume post-mortem
friendship with his son's son? However, by the time he was launched into
German student-life, dividing his time fitfully between his university
and his music, young Cotton Mather was forced to admit that an ancestral
fortune was no despicable addition to the stock in trade of a man
starting in life. He only needed to watch the grinding existences of
some of his comrades to realize the value of money in shaping a broad
artistic career. Instead of wasting his gray matter over details of ways
and means, he could let th