s comes to us rapidly only in the
fairy-tales. In the real, beautiful, healthy world in which we live we
have to work hard and honestly for the power either to get things or
to do things. By faithful labor must we win what we want. What we do
not labor for we do not get. That is a condition of things so simple
that a child can readily understand it. But all, children and their
elders, are apt to forget it. In the life of every great man there is
a story different from that of every other great man, _but in every
one of them_ this truth about laboring for the power one has is found.

In our Talk on Listening, it was said that the sounds we hear around
us are the more easily understood if we first become familiar with the
melody which is called the major scale. But in order to think music it
is necessary to know it--in fact, music-thinking is impossible without
it. As it is no trouble to learn the scale, all of you should get it
fixed in the mind quickly and securely.

It is now possible for you to hear the scale without singing its tones
aloud. Listen and see if that is not so! Now think of the melodies you
know, the songs you sing, the pieces you play. You can sing them quite
loudly (_can_ you sing them?) or in a medium tone, or you can hum them
softly as if to yourself; or further yet, you can think them without
making the faintest sound, and every tone will be as plain as when you
sang it the loudest. Here, I can tell you that Beethoven wrote many of
his greatest works when he was so deaf that he could not hear the
music he made. Hence, he must have been able to write it out of his
thought just as he wanted it to sound. When you understand these steps
and ways you will then know about the beginning of music-thinking.

Let us inquire in this Talk what the piano has to do in our
music-thinking. What relation is there between the music in the mind
and the tones produced by the piano? It seems really as if the piano
were a photographic camera, making for us a picture of what we have
written,--a camera so subtle indeed, that it pictures not things we
can see and touch, but invisible things which exist only within us.
But faithful as the piano is in this, it may become the means of doing
us much injury. We may get into the habit of trusting the piano to
think for us, of making it do so, in fact. Instead of looking
carefully through the pages of our new music, reading and
understanding it with the mind, we run to the piano