omas
seldom spoke of his youth or his early struggles, but that night he
turned back the pages and told Harsanyi a long story.

He said he had spent the summer of his fifteenth year wandering about
alone in the South, giving violin concerts in little towns. He traveled
on horseback. When he came into a town, he went about all day tacking up
posters announcing his concert in the evening. Before the concert, he
stood at the door taking in the admission money until his audience had
arrived, and then he went on the platform and played. It was a lazy,
hand-to-mouth existence, and Thomas said he must have got to like that
easy way of living and the relaxing Southern atmosphere. At any rate,
when he got back to New York in the fall, he was rather torpid; perhaps
he had been growing too fast. From this adolescent drowsiness the lad
was awakened by two voices, by two women who sang in New York in
1851,--Jenny Lind and Henrietta Sontag. They were the first great
artists he had ever heard, and he never forgot his debt to them.

As he said, "It was not voice and execution alone. There was a greatness
about them. They were great women, great artists. They opened a new
world to me." Night after night he went to hear them, striving to
reproduce the quality of their tone upon his violin. From that time his
idea about strings was completely changed, and on his violin he tried
always for the singing, vibrating tone, instead of the loud and somewhat
harsh tone then prevalent among even the best German violinists. In
later years he often advised violinists to study singing, and singers to
study violin. He told Harsanyi that he got his first conception of tone
quality from Jenny Lind.

"But, of course," he added, "the great thing I got from Lind and Sontag
was the indefinite, not the definite, thing. For an impressionable boy,
their inspiration was incalculable. They gave me my first feeling for
the Italian style--but I could never say how much they gave me. At that
age, such influences are actually creative. I always think of my
artistic consciousness as beginning then."

All his life Thomas did his best to repay what he felt he owed to the
singer's art. No man could get such singing from choruses, and no man
worked harder to raise the standard of singing in schools and churches
and choral societies.

VII

All through the lesson Thea had felt that Harsanyi was restless and
abstracted. Before the hour was over, he pushed back h