nts the gay crowd buzzed, and some
stood up and looked about at their neighbors. The interval was short,
however,--for the Quintette performers came upon the stage, and took
their places.

I leaned back and covered my face with my hand. My memory was still
ringing with echoes of the forlorn cry of wrecked love, mingled with the
imaginary sobs I had just heard; therefore I hardly listened to the
majestic opening of full, harmonious chords, which lead grandly into a
sort of cantabile movement.

The curious modulations which followed aroused me, and I soon busied
myself in tracing the changes from major to minor, and from one minor
key to another, as sorrows chase each other in life. Just at this part
of the composition occurs the passage which sounds like a weird, ghostly
call or summons: when I heard it, my fancy began working, and, like
Heine, I saw spectres in the music sounds.

The air seemed to have grown suddenly "nipping and eager." I
unconsciously drew my mantle around my shoulders, as a shiver ran over
me, such as nurses tell us in childhood is caused by some one walking
over our graves. I fancied I saw before me the ghost scene in "Hamlet."
There was the castle platform,--the gloomy battlements,--the sound of
distant wassail; and dimly defined by the vague light of my fancy, stood
the sad young Danish prince, shivering in the "shrewd, biting"
night-air, tortured with those apprehensions and sickening doubts

"That cloud the mind and fire the brain,"

but talking with a feigned and courtly indifference to his dear friend,
"the profound scholar and perfect gentleman," Horatio; and in the gloom
around them seemed to be arising the questionable shape which was

"So horridly to shake his disposition."

Strangely the music displayed its fine forms, mingling most curiously
with, while it created, my fancied pictures,--and though my senses
followed the changing visions, which flitted like a phantasmagoria
before my eyes, my mind traced clearly the music train; but when the
diminished seventh resolved gracefully into the melody which is taken
alternately by 'cello and viola,--the close of the first movement,--my
vision faded gradually away.

There was a short pause, but the fine artists who were executing the
Quintette did not by any undignified movement break the illusion which
the music had created; although a violin-string needed raising, it was
done with quiet and skilful dexterity, and they proceede