cannot find free utterance for all her stormy
inner life either in words or song! So long as a woman can talk, there
is nothing she cannot bear. If she cannot have a companion to listen to
her woes, and has no musical utterance, vocal or instrumental,--then, if
she is of the real woman sort, and has a few heartfuls of wild blood in
her, and you have done her a wrong,--double-bolt the door which she may
enter on noiseless slipper at midnight,--look twice before you taste of
any cup whose draught the shadow of her hand may have darkened!

But let her talk, and, above all, cry, or, if she is one of the
coarser-grained tribe, give her the run of all the red-hot expletives in
the language, and let her blister her lips with them until she is tired,
she will sleep like a lamb after it, and you may take a cup of coffee
from her without stirring it up to look for its sediment.

So, if she can sing, or play on any musical instrument, all her
wickedness will run off through her throat or the tips of her fingers.
How many tragedies find their peaceful catastrophe in fierce roulades and
strenuous bravuras! How many murders are executed in double-quick time
upon the keys which stab the air with their dagger-strokes of sound!
What would our civilization be without the piano? Are not Erard and
Broadwood and Chickering the true humanizers of our time? Therefore do I
love to hear the all-pervading tum tum jarring the walls of little
parlors in houses with double door-plates on their portals, looking out
on streets and courts which to know is to be unknown, and where to exist
is not to live, according to any true definition of living. Therefore
complain I not of modern degeneracy, when, even from the open window of
the small unlovely farmhouse, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine
flavors and the flat-patterned woman of broken-down countenance, issue
the same familiar sounds. For who knows that Almira, but for these keys,
which throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords would not have
been floating, dead, in the brown stream which slides through the meadows
by her father's door,--or living, with that other current which runs
beneath the gas-lights over the slimy pavement, choking with wretched
weeds that were once in spotless flower?

Poor Elsie! She never sang nor played. She never shaped her inner life
in words: such utterance was as much denied to her nature as common
articulate speech to the deaf mute. Her only