ghted room, and leaning out over a dim land, where the
sunset was slowly dying across the rim of the tired world.

Hugh always found it easy to make friends with musicians. They
generally seemed to him to be almost a race apart; their art seemed to
withdraw them in a curious way from the world, and to absorb into
itself the intellectual vigour which was as a rule, with ordinary men,
distributed over a variety of interests. He knew some musicians who
were men of wide cultivation, but they were very much the exception; as
a rule, they seemed to Hugh to be a simple and almost childlike
species, fond of laughter and elementary jests, with emotions rather
superficial than deep, and not regarding life from the ordinary
standpoint at all. The reason lay, Hugh believed, in the nature of the
medium in which they worked; the writer and the artist were brought
into direct contact with humanity; it was their business to interpret
life, to investigate emotion; but the musician was engaged with an art
that was almost mathematical in its purity and isolation; he worked
under the strictest law, and though it required a severe and strong
intellectual grip, it was not a process which had any connection with
emotions or with life. But Hugh always felt himself to be inside the
charmed circle, and though he knew but little of the art, musical talk
always had a deep interest for him, and he seemed to divine and
understand more than he could explain or express.

But still it was true that music had played no part in his intellectual
development; he had never approached it on that side; it had merely
ministered to him at intervals a species of emotional stimulus; it had
seemed to him to speak a language, dim and unintelligible, but the
purport of which he interpreted to be somehow high and solemn. There
seemed indeed to be nothing in the world that spoke in such mysterious
terms of an august destiny awaiting the soul. The origin, the very
elements of the joy of music were so absolutely inexplicable. There
seemed to be no assignable cause for the fact that the mixture of
rhythmical progress and natural vibration should have such a singular
and magical power over the human soul, and affect it with such
indescribable emotion.

He had sometimes seen, half with amusement, half with a far deeper
interest, the physical effect which the music of some itinerant
piano-organ would produce upon street children; they seemed affected by
some curio