er a long absence he returned to Heidelberg
where his student life had been happy--or at least had seemed so to him
in the latter, lonesome years. Behold, he found the same reckless crowd,
swaggering, carousing, flirting, dueling, debt-making, love-making, and
occasionally studying. He liked it so well that, if I mistake not, the
place killed him. I felt very much in the same position as the Doctor
Juettner of the play when I returned to Paris last summer. The
_Conservatoire_ is still in its old, crooked, narrow street; it is still
a noisy sheol as one enters at the gate; and there is still the same old
gang of callow youths and extremely pert misses going and coming. Only
they all seem more sophisticated nowadays. They--naturally enough--know
more than their daddies, and they show it. As they brushed past,
literally elbowing me, they seemed contemptuously arrogant in their
youthful exuberance. And yet, and yet--_ego in Arcadia!_

I stood in the quadrangle and dreamed. Forty years ago--or is it
fifty?--I had stood there before; but it was in the chilly month of
November. I was young then, and I was very ambitious. The little Ohio
town whose obscurity I had hoped to transform into fame--ah! these mad
dreams of egotistical boyhood--did not resent my leaving it. It still
stands where it was--stands still. I seem to have gone on, and yet I
return to that little, dull, dilapidated town in my thoughts, for it was
there I enjoyed the purple visions of music, where I fondly believed
that I, too, might go forth into the world and make harmony. I did; but
my harmony exercises were always returned full of blue marks. Such is
life--and its lead-pencil ironies!

To be precise as well as concise, I stood in the concierge's bureau some
forty years ago and wondered if the secretary would see me. He did.
After he had tortured me as to my age, parentage, nationality,
qualifications, even personal habits, it occurred to him to ask me what
I wanted in Paris. I told him, readily enough, that I had crossed the
yeasty Atlantic in a sailing vessel--for motives of economy--that I
might study the pianoforte in Paris. I remember that I also naively
inquired the hours when M. Francois Liszt--he called him _Litz!_--gave
his lessons. The secretary was too polite to laugh at my provincial
ignorance, but he coughed violently several times. Then I was informed
that M. Liszt never gave piano-lessons any time, any-where; that he was
to be found in Weima