ss already.

I watched her closely through the prelude to _Tristan and Isolde_,
trying vainly to conjecture what that seething turmoil of strings and
winds might mean to her, but she sat mutely staring at the violin bows
that drove obliquely downward, like the pelting streaks of rain in a
summer shower. Had this music any message for her? Had she enough left
to at all comprehend this power which had kindled the world since she
had left it? I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat
silent upon her peak in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility
throughout the number from _The Flying Dutchman_, though her fingers
worked mechanically upon her black dress, as though, of themselves, they
were recalling the piano score they had once played. Poor old hands!
They had been stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and
lift and knead with; the palms unduly swollen, the fingers bent and
knotted--on one of them a thin, worn band that had once been a wedding
ring. As I pressed and gently quieted one of those groping hands I
remembered with quivering eyelids their services for me in other days.

Soon after the tenor began the "Prize Song," I heard a quick drawn
breath and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were
glistening on her cheeks, and I think, in a moment more, they were in
my eyes as well. It never really died, then--the soul that can suffer so
excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only;
like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and
yet, if placed in water, grows green again. She wept so throughout the
development and elaboration of the melody.

During the intermission before the second half of the concert, I
questioned my aunt and found that the "Prize Song" was not new to her.
Some years before there had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a
young German, a tramp cowpuncher, who had sung the chorus at Bayreuth,
when he was a boy, along with the other peasant boys and girls. Of a
Sunday morning he used to sit on his gingham-sheeted bed in the hands'
bedroom which opened off the kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots
and saddle, singing the "Prize Song," while my aunt went about her work
in the kitchen. She had hovered about him until she had prevailed upon
him to join the country church, though his sole fitness for this step,
insofar as I could gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of
this divine melody. S