ter a lesson; and, had he been a
less gifted man than he was, he could not have failed to make progress
with such a teacher.

The large-hearted, delicate-souled woman felt nothing strange in the
presence of the workingman, but, on the contrary, was comfortably aware
of a being like her own, less privileged but more gifted, whose
nearness was strength. And no teacher, not to say no woman, could have
failed to be pleased at the thorough painstaking with which he followed
the slightest of her hints, and the delight his flushed face would
reveal when she praised the success he had achieved.

It was not long before he began to write some of the things that came
into his mind. For the period of quiescence as to production, which
followed the initiation of more orderly study, was, after all, but of
short duration, and the return tide of musical utterance was stronger
than ever. Mary's delight was great when first he brought her one of
his compositions very fairly written out--after which others followed
with a rapidity that astonished her. They enabled her also to
understand the man better and better; for to have a thing to brood over
which we are capable of understanding must be more to us than even the
master's playing of it. She could not be sure this or that was correct,
according to the sweet inexorability of musical ordainment, but the
more she pondered them, the more she felt that the man was original,
that the material was there, and the law at hand, that he brought his
music from the only bottomless well of utterance, the truth, namely, by
which alone the soul most glorious in gladness, or any other the
stupidest of souls, can live.

To the first he brought her she contrived to put a poor little faulty
accompaniment; and when she played his air to him so accompanied, his
delight was touching, and not a little amusing. Plainly he thought the
accompaniment a triumph of human faculty, and beyond anything he could
ever develop. Never pupil was more humble, never pupil more obedient;
thinking nothing of himself or of anything he had done or could do, his
path was open to the swiftest and highest growth. It matters little
where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.
The next point will be, whether he is growing at the ratio given him.
The key to the whole thing is _obedience_, and nothing else.

What the gift of such an instructor was to Joseph, my reader may be
requested to imagine. He was lik