quito netting tacked over the window and I lay
watching a certain bright star that burned red above the cornfield--and
sing "Home to our mountains, O, let us return!" in a way fit to break the
heart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness already.

I watched her closely through the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, trying
vainly to conjecture what that seething turmoil of strings and winds
might mean to her, but she sat mutely staring at the violin bows that
drove obliquely downward, like the pelting streaks of rain in a summer
shower. Had this music any message for her? Had she enough left to at all
comprehend this power which had kindled the world since she had left it?
I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat silent upon her
peak in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility throughout
the number from The Flying Dutchman, though her fingers worked
mechanically upon her black dress, as if, of themselves, they were
recalling the piano score they had once played. Poor hands! They had been
stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and lift and knead
with;--on one of them a thin, worn band that had once been a wedding
ring. As I pressed and gently quieted one of those groping hands, I
remembered with quivering eyelids their services for me in other days.

Soon after the tenor began the "Prize Song," I heard a quick drawn breath
and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were
glistening on her cheeks, and I think, in a moment more, they were in my
eyes as well. It never really died, then--the soul which can suffer so
excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only;
like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and
yet, if placed in water, grows green again. She wept so throughout the
development and elaboration of the melody.

During the intermission before the second half, I questioned my aunt and
found that the "Prize Song" was not new to her. Some years before there
had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a young German, a tramp
cow-puncher, who had sung in the chorus at Bayreuth when he was a boy,
along with the other peasant boys and girls. Of a Sunday morning he used
to sit on his gingham-sheeted bed in the hands' bedroom which opened off
the kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots and saddle, singing the
"Prize Song," while my aunt went about her work in the kitchen. She had
hovered over him until she had prevailed upon him