fact
that the piano-player required hands and feet of flesh and blood for
anything more than a purely mechanical rendering of the music provided
by the rolls; while in the Orpheus, expression, accent, interpretation,
as given by the best pianists of the day, had been already registered in
the cylinders.

On the pianola, or what preceded it--then as now--the player provided
his own rendering. But the Orpheus, the precursor also of types that
have since been greatly perfected, was played by an electrical
mechanism, and the audience was intended to listen to Chopin or
Beethoven, to Schumann or Brahms, as interpreted by the famous players
of the moment, without any intervening personality.

These things are very familiar to our generation. In the eighties, they
were only a vision and a possibility, and Falloden's lavish expenditure
was in fact stimulating one of the first inventors.

But Connie also was playing an important part. Both Lord and Lady
Risborough had possessed devoted friends in Paris, and Connie had made
others of her own among the young folk with whom she had danced and
flirted and talked during a happy spring with her parents in the Avenue
Marceau. She had set these playfellows of hers to work, and with most
brilliant success. Otto's story, as told by her vivacious letters, had
gone the round. No woman of twice her age could have told it more
adroitly. Otto appeared as the victim of an unfortunate accident in a
college frolic; Falloden as the guardian friend; herself, as his
lieutenant. It touched the romantic sense, the generous heart of musical
Paris. There were many who remembered Otto's father and mother and the
musical promise of the bright-haired boy. The Polish colony in Paris, a
survival from the tragic days of Poland's exodus under the revolutionary
skies of the thirties and the sixties, had been appealed to, and both
Polish and French musicians were already in communication with Chaumart,
and producing records under his direction. The young Polish marvel of
the day--Paderewski--had been drawn in, and his renderings of Chopin's
finest work were to provide the bulk of the rolls. Connie's dear old
Polish teacher, himself a composer, was at work on a grouping of
folk-songs from Poland and Lithuania--the most characteristic utterance
of a martyred people.

"They are songs, _chere petite_," wrote the old man--"of revolt, of
exile, and of death. There is no other folk-song like them in the
world, jus