nius. Still in his early manhood--he was only twenty--the maturity of
his musical intelligence and the poetry of his style created havoc in
impressionable hearts. With his mixed blood, Hungarian and Italian,
Marco Davos' performance of romantic composers was irresistible; in it
there was something of Pachmann's wayward grace and Paderewski's
plangency, but with an added infusion of gypsy wildness which evoked for
old concert-goers memories of Liszt the brilliant rhapsodist.

But he soon overpaid the score presented by the goddess Fortune--his
nerves were sadly jangled. A horror of the human face obsessed his
waking and sleeping hours; he dreamed of colossal countenances with
threatening eyes, a vast composite of the audiences he nightly faced. As
his popularity increased the waning of his self-respect told him that he
must go into retreat, anywhere out of the musical world--else would his
art suffer. It did suffer. The nervous diffidence, called stage-fright,
which had never assailed his supreme self-balance, intruded its
unwelcome presence. Marco, several months after he had discovered all
these mischievous symptoms, the maladies of artistic adolescence, was
not assured when the critics hinted of them--the public would surely
follow suit in a few weeks. Then came the visit to the learned Viennese
doctor and the trip to Ischl. A few more months of this appalling
absorption in his own personality, this morbid marriage of man to his
own image, and he suspected that his brain would be irretrievably
injured.

He was a curious student of matters psychologic as well as musical. A
friendly laboratory had inducted him into many biologic mysteries.
Particularly fascinating to him was the tactile sense, that sense of
touch wherewith man acquaints himself with this earth-clot swimming in
space. Davos contemplated the tips of his fingers as he sat in the
grateful cool, his ten voices as he named them. With them he sang,
thundered, and thought upon the keyboard of his grand piano-forte. A
miracle, indeed, these slender cushions of fat, ramified by a network of
nerves, sinews, and bones as exquisite in their mechanism as the motion
of the planets. If hearing is a miracle, so is touch; the ear is not a
resonator, as has been so long maintained, but an apparatus which
records variations of pressure. This makes it subservient to the laws of
sensation; touch and hearing are akin. It aroused the pride of Davos
after he had read the revol