ount of learning or art. Therefore,
better than many a poet, Mary was able to set forth the scope and
design of this one. Herself at the heart of the secret from which came
all his utterance, she could fit herself into most of the convolutions
of the shell of his expression, and was hence able also to make others
perceive in his verse not a little of what they were of themselves
unable to see.

"We shall have you lecturing at the Royal Institution yet, Mary," said
Tom; "only it will be long before its members care for that sort of
antique."

Tom's insight had always been ahead of his character, and of late he
had been growing. People do grow very fast in bed sometimes. Also he
had in him plenty of material, to which a childlike desire now began to
give shapes and sequences.

The musician's remark consisted in taking his violin, and once more
giving his idea of the "old gentleman's" music, but this time with a
richer expression and fuller harmonies. Mary had every reason to be
satisfied with her experiment. From that time she talked a good deal
more about her favorite writers, and interested both the critical taste
of Tom and the artistic instinct of the blacksmith.

But Joseph's playing had great faults: how could it be otherwise?--and
to Mary great seemed the pity that genius should not be made perfect in
faculty, that it should not have that redemption of its body for which
unwittingly it groaned. And the man was one of those childlike natures
which may indeed go a long time without discovering this or that
external fault in themselves, patent to the eye of many an inferior
onlooker--for the simple soul is the last to see its own outside--but,
once they become aware of it, begin that moment to set the thing right.
At the same time he had not enough of knowledge to render it easy to
show him by words wherein any fault consisted--the nature, the being of
the fault, that is--what it simply was; but Mary felt confident that,
the moment he saw a need, he would obey its law.

She had taken for herself the rooms below, formerly occupied by the
Helmers, with the hope of seeing them before long reinstated in them;
and there she had a piano, the best she could afford to hire: with its
aid she hoped to do something toward the breaking of the invisible
bonds that tied the wings of Jasper's genius.

His great fault lay in his time. Dare I suggest that he contented
himself with measuring it to his inner ear, and let his fing