rung and tuned it will
respond to all outside harmonies."

The Professor has some ideas about music, which I believe he has given to
the world in one form or another; but the world is growing old and
forgetful, and needs to be reminded now and then of what one has formerly
told it.

"I have had glimpses," the Professor said, "of the conditions into which
music is capable of bringing a sensitive nature. Glimpses, I say,
because I cannot pretend that I am capable of sounding all the depths or
reaching all the heights to which music may transport our mortal
consciousness. Let me remind you of a curious fact with reference to the
seat of the musical sense. Far down below the great masses of thinking
marrow and its secondary agents, just as the brain is about to merge in
the spinal cord, the roots of the nerve of hearing spread their white
filaments out into the sentient matter, where they report what the
external organs of hearing tell them. This sentient matter is in remote
connection only with the mental organs, far more remote than the centres
of the sense of vision and that of smell. In a word, the musical faculty
might be said to have a little brain of its own. It has a special world
and a private language all to itself. How can one explain its
significance to those whose musical faculties are in a rudimentary state
of development, or who have never had them trained? Can you describe in
intelligible language the smell of a rose as compared with that of a
violet? No,--music can be translated only by music. Just so far as it
suggests worded thought, it falls short of its highest office. Pure
emotional movements of the spiritual nature,--that is what I ask of
music. Music will be the universal language,--the Volapuk of spiritual
being."

"Angels sit down with their harps and play at each other, I suppose,"
said Number Seven. "Must have an atmosphere up there if they have harps,
or they wouldn't get any music. Wonder if angels breathe like mortals?
If they do, they must have lungs and air passages, of course. Think of
an angel with the influenza, and nothing but a cloud for a handkerchief!"

--This is a good instance of the way in which Number Seven's squinting
brain works. You will now and then meet just such brains in heads you
know very well. Their owners are much given to asking unanswerable
questions. A physicist may settle it for us whether there is an
atmosphere about a planet or not, but it takes a brain with a