nd his mother's portrait
and letters. As he dreamed on, his dream got louder, and, he hoped, was
waking a more and more vivid dream in the mind of the sleeper. 'For who
can tell,' thought Falconer, 'what mysterious sympathies of blood and
childhood's experience there may be between me and that man?--such, it
may be, that my utterance on the violin will wake in his soul the
very visions of which my soul is full while I play, each with its own
nebulous atmosphere of dream-light around it.' For music wakes its own
feeling, and feeling wakes thought, or rather, when perfected, blossoms
into thought, thought radiant of music as those lilies that shine
phosphorescent in the July nights. He played more and more forcefully,
growing in hope. But he had been led astray in some measure by the
fulness of his expectation. Strange to tell, doctor as he was, he had
forgotten one important factor in his calculation: how the man would
awake from his artificial sleep. He had not reckoned of how the limbeck
of his brain would be left discoloured with vile deposit, when the fumes
of the narcotic should have settled and given up its central spaces to
the faintness of desertion.

Robert was very keen of hearing. Indeed he possessed all his senses
keener than any other man I have known. He heard him toss on his bed.
Then he broke into a growl, and damned the miauling, which, he said,
the strings could never have learned anywhere but in a cat's belly. But
Robert was used to bad language; and there are some bad things which,
seeing that there they are, it is of the greatest consequence to get
used to. It gave him, no doubt, a pang of disappointment to hear such an
echo to his music from the soul which he had hoped especially fitted to
respond in harmonious unison with the wail of his violin. But not
for even this moment did he lose his presence of mind. He instantly
moderated the tone of the instrument, and gradually drew the sound away
once more into the distance of hearing. But he did not therefore let it
die. Through various changes it floated in the thin aether of the soul,
changes delicate as when the wind leaves the harp of the reeds by a
river's brink, and falls a-ringing at the heather bells, or playing with
the dry silvery pods of honesty that hang in the poor man's garden, till
at length it drew nearer once more, bearing on its wings the wail of
red Flodden, the Flowers of the Forest. Listening through the melody for
sounds of a far d