oned debtors--all came in for their share.

Handel never married. That remark of Dean Swift's, "I admire
Handel--principally because he conceals his petticoat peccadilloes with
such perfection," does not go. Handel considered himself a priest of
art, and his passion spent itself in his work.

The closing years of his life were a time of peace and honor. His bark,
after a fitful voyage, had glided into safe and peaceful waters. The
calamity of blindness did not much depress him--"What matters it so long
as I can hear?" he said. And good it is to know that the capacity to
listen and enjoy, to think and feel, to sympathize and love--to live his
Ideals--were his, even to the night of his passing Hence.

[Illustration: GIUSEPPE VERDI]

GIUSEPPE VERDI

Of all the operas that Verdi wrote,
The best, to my taste, is the Trovatore;
And Mario can soothe, with a tenor note,
The souls in purgatory.

The moon on the tower slept soft as snow;
And who was not thrilled in the strangest way,
As we heard him sing while the lights burned low,
"Non ti scordar di me"?

* * * * *

But O, the smell of that jasmine-flower!
And O, the music! and O, the way
That voice rang out from the donjon tower,
"Non ti scordar di me,
Non ti scordar di me!"

--_Bulwer-Lytton_

GIUSEPPE VERDI

He sort of clung to the iron pickets, did the boy, and pressed his face
through the fence and listened. Some one was playing the piano in the
big house, and the windows with their little diamond panes were flung
open to catch the evening breeze. He listened.

His big gray eyes were open wide, the pupils dilated--he was trying to
see the music as well as hear it.

The boy's hair matched the yellow of his face, being one shade lighter,
sun-bleached from going hatless. His clothes were as yellow as the
yellow of his face, and shaded off into the dust that strewed the
street. He was like a quail in a stubble-field--you might have stepped
over him and never seen him at all. He listened. Almost every evening
some one played the piano in the big house. He had discovered the fact a
week before, and now, when the dusk was gathering, he would watch his
chance and slide away from the hut where his parents lived, and run fast
up the hill, and along the shelving roadway to the tall iron fence that
marked the residence of Signore Barezzi. He