nd homeless and forlorn.

There was a small piano in this room, a clattery, wheezy,
asthmatic thing, certainly the very worst miscarriage
in the way of a piano that the world has seen. In turn,
five or six dejected and homesick ladies approached
it doubtingly, gave it a single inquiring thump, and retired
with the lockjaw. But the boss of that instrument was
to come, nevertheless; and from my own country--from Arkansaw.

She was a brand-new bride, innocent, girlish, happy in herself
and her grave and worshiping stripling of a husband; she was
about eighteen, just out of school, free from affections,
unconscious of that passionless multitude around her;
and the very first time she smote that old wreck one
recognized that it had met its destiny. Her stripling
brought an armful of aged sheet-music from their room
--for this bride went "heeled," as you might say--and bent
himself lovingly over and got ready to turn the pages.

The bride fetched a swoop with her fingers from one end
of the keyboard to the other, just to get her bearings,
as it were, and you could see the congregation set their teeth
with the agony of it. Then, without any more preliminaries,
she turned on all the horrors of the "Battle of Prague,"
that venerable shivaree, and waded chin-deep in the blood
of the slain. She made a fair and honorable average
of two false notes in every five, but her soul was in arms
and she never stopped to correct. The audience stood it
with pretty fair grit for a while, but when the cannonade
waxed hotter and fiercer, and the discord average
rose to four in five, the procession began to move.
A few stragglers held their ground ten minutes longer,
but when the girl began to wring the true inwardness out
of the "cries of the wounded," they struck their colors
and retired in a kind of panic.

There never was a completer victory; I was the only
non-combatant left on the field. I would not have
deserted my countrywoman anyhow, but indeed I had no
desires in that direction. None of us like mediocrity,
but we all reverence perfection. This girl's music
was perfection in its way; it was the worst music that
had ever been achieved on our planet by a mere human being.

I moved up close, and never lost a strain. When she
got through, I asked her to play it again. She did it
with a pleased alacrity and a heightened enthusiasm.
She made it ALL discords, this time. She got an amount
of anguish into the cries of the