the tutti of the G minor concerto of Dussek (an intimate friend of the
Gospadin's, by the way) did he cease his chuckling.

The concerto was played in a dreary fashion, and only the strenuous
efforts of the attendants on each side of the soloist kept him from
going off into a sound nap during every tutti. The rest of the piano
program was almost the same story. The Steibelt selection, the
old-fashioned _L'Orage_, was no storm at all, but a feeble, maundering
up and down the keyboard. The Czerny fugue was better and the
performance of the same composer's _Velocity Studies_ was a marvel of
lightness and one might almost say volubility. In these etudes his
wonderful stiff arm octave playing, in the real old-fashioned manner,
showed itself, for in every run in single notes he introduced octaves.
The applause after this was so great and the flappers at the pianist's
side plied him so vigorously that the Gospadin actually began playing
the _Hexameron_, that remarkably difficult and old set of variations on
the march in _Puritani_, by Liszt, Chopin, Pixis, and Thalberg.

These he played, it must be confessed, in a masterly manner, but at the
end he introduced a variation, prodigious as to difficulty, which I
failed to recognize as ever having seen it in the printed copy of the
composition. Again my right-hand neighbor, appearing to anticipate my
question on the subject, informed me that it was by Bundelcund himself,
and that he had been angered beyond control by the refusal of the
publishers to print it with the rest, and had written a lengthy letter
to Liszt on the subject, in which he told him that he considered him a
charlatan along with Henselt, Chopin, Hiller, and Thalberg, and that he
was the _only_ pianist worth speaking of, which information threw an
interesting side light on our Asiatic virtuoso's character, and showed
that he was made of about the same metal, after all, as most of your
European manipulators of ivory.

By this time the stage had been cleared of the piano and the litter, and
a conductor's stand was brought forward, draped in black velvet trimmed
with white, and appropriately wreathed with tuberoses, whose
deathly-sweet odor diffused itself throughout the house and caused an
unpleasant shudder to circulate through the audience, who were beginning
to realize the mockery of this modern dance of death, but who remained
to see the end of the sad comedy. The orchestra, which was reinforced by
several unc