entine_ had palled upon him in time. Lingering deaths
become monotonous. When one dies them, four or five times a week, he
longs to hasten the course of events, to change the _Andante_ to a
_Prestissimo_. To Thayer's later mood, it seemed that, psychologically
speaking, _Valentine_ belonged to the ranks of the tenors. His riper
manhood demanded something a little more robust.

Thayer never admitted to himself that his liking for _The Dutchman_ came
from the personal interpretation which he put upon the story. In some
moods, he would have scoffed at the idea that there could be any
connection between himself, the successful artist whose single surname
on the bill boards could suffice to fill a house, and the wretched
_Dutchman_ whose one defiance hurled at fate had condemned him to
life-long wandering over the face of the deep. Of course, he wandered,
too; but it was by easy stages and by means of Pullmans. The parallelism
failed utterly. Still, there was the possibility of ultimate salvation
gained through the faithful love of a woman. Nevertheless, Thayer's
analysis always brought him to the conclusion that he liked the opera
because his death scene was consummated in the brief space of two
measures.

Thayer was feeling uncommonly alert and content, that night, and,
moreover, he liked his audience. Accordingly, he gave them of his best.
Never had his voice been richer, never had it rung with more dramatic
power than when, in his aria of the first act, he had ended his lament
with the declaration of his inevitable release on the slow-coming
Judgment Day. Then he stood waiting, a huge, lonely, brooding figure,
square-shouldered, square-jawed, defiant of fate, while softly the
chorus of sailors in the hold below echoed the closing phrase of his
song.

Even into Thayer's experience, no such ovation had ever come before. At
first, the audience sat breathless, as if stunned by the might of his
tragedy. Then the applause came crashing down from the galleries, up
from the floor, in from the boxes, focussing itself from all sides upon
that single, lonely, dominant figure before it. And Cotton Mather
Thayer, as he listened with a quiet, impassive face, felt his heart
leaping and bounding within him. He knew, by an instinct which he had
learned to trust completely, that in the years to come, he would never
reach a greater height of artistic success than he had done just then.
One such experience could justify many a year of ha