their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the
instruments, the patches of yellow light thrown by the green-shaded
lamps on the smooth, varnished bellies of the cellos and the bass viols
in the rear, the restless, wind-tossed forest of fiddle necks and bows-I
recalled how, in the first orchestra I had ever heard, those long bow
strokes seemed to draw the heart out of me, as a conjurer's stick reels
out yards of paper ribbon from a hat.

The first number was the _Tannhauser_ overture. When the horns drew out
the first strain of the Pilgrim's chorus my Aunt Georgiana clutched
my coat sleeve. Then it was I first realized that for her this broke a
silence of thirty years; the inconceivable silence of the plains. With
the battle between the two motives, with the frenzy of the Venusberg
theme and its ripping of strings, there came to me an overwhelming sense
of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat; and I saw again the
tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden fortress;
the black pond where I had learned to swim, its margin pitted with
sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain-gullied clay banks about the naked
house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the dishcloths were always
hung to dry before the kitchen door. The world there was the flat world
of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak;
to the west, a corral that reached to sunset; between, the conquests of
peace, dearer bought than those of war.

The overture closed; my aunt released my coat sleeve, but she said
nothing. She sat staring at the orchestra through a dullness of thirty
years, through the films made little by little by each of the three
hundred and sixty-five days in every one of them. What, I wondered, did
she get from it? She had been a good pianist in her day I knew, and her
musical education had been broader than that of most music teachers of
a quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart's operas and
Meyerbeer's, and I could remember hearing her sing, years ago, certain
melodies of Verdi's. When I had fallen ill with a fever in her house she
used to sit by my cot in the evening--when the cool, night wind blew
in through the faded mosquito netting tacked over the window, and I lay
watching a certain bright star that burned red above the cornfield--and
sing "Home to our mountains, O, let us return!" in a way fit to break
the heart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickne