fied except Mrs. Marshall, who
insisted that she should go to the moving pictures while the Professor
took Sylvia to the concert.

Then followed the most amiable, generous wrangle as to which of the
parents should enjoy the adult form of amusement. But while the
Professor grew more and more half-hearted in his protestations that
he really didn't care where he went, Mrs. Marshall grew more and
more positive that he must not be allowed to miss the music, finally
silencing his last weak proffer of self-abnegation by saying
peremptorily: "No, no, Elliott; go on in to your debauch of emotion.
I'll take the children. Don't miss your chance. You know it means ten
times as much to you as to me. You haven't heard a good orchestra in
years."

Sylvia had never been in such a huge hall as the one where they
presently sat, high, giddily high in the eyrie of a top gallery. They
looked down into yawning space. The vast size of the auditorium so
dwarfed the people now taking their innumerable seats, that even after
the immense audience was assembled the great semicircular enclosure
seemed empty and blank. It received those thousands of souls into its
maw, and made no sign; awaiting some visitation worthy of its bulk.

The orchestra, an army of ants, straggled out on the stage. Sylvia was
astonished at their numbers--sixteen first violins, she saw by the
program! She commented to her father on the difficulty of keeping
them all in tune. He smiled at her absently, bade her, with an air
of suppressed excitement, wait until she had heard them, and fell
to biting his nails nervously. She re-read the program and all the
advertisements, hypnotized, like every one else in the audience, by
the sight of printed matter. She noticed that the first number of this
memorial concert was the funeral march from the Goetterdaemmerung, which
she knew very well from having heard a good many times a rather thin
version of it for four strings and a piano.

The conductor, a solitary ant, made his toilsome way across the great
front of the stage, evoking a burst of applause, which resounded
hollowly in the inhuman spaces of the building. He mounted a step,
waved his antennae, there was a great indrawn breath of silence,
and then Sylvia, waiting with agreeable curiosity to hear how a big
orchestra would really sound, gasped and held her breath. The cup of
that vast building suddenly brimmed with a magical flood of pure tone,
coming from everywhere, from no