tion that covered it suggested the work of a careful copyist rather
than the original hand of a composer. I could not refrain from looking
at one piece. It was a very short and very simple Adagio cantabile in
the Key of F for a solo pianoforte. It appealed at once to me as a
singer, for its quiet, unaffected melody seemed made to be sung rather
than to be played. The "cantabile" of its heading was superfluous--it
was a Song without Words, evidently one of a new set, for I knew it was
none of the old. But the sound of a footstep startled me and I guiltily
replaced the sheet. The door opened, and I was warmly greeted in
excellent English by the man who entered. I had no need to be told that
it was Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy himself.

Nature is strangely freakish in her choice of instruments for noble
purposes. Sometimes the delicate spirit of creative genius is housed in
a veritable tenement of clay, so that what is within seems ever at war
with what is without. At times the antagonism is more dreadful still,
and the artist-soul is sent to dwell in the body of a beast, coarse
in speech and habit, ignorant and dull in mind, vile and unclean in
thought. But sometimes Nature is generous, and makes the body itself an
expression of the informing spirit. Mendelssohn was one of these almost
rare instances. In him, artist and man were like a beautiful picture
appropriately framed. He was then thirty-one. In figure he was slim and
rather below the middle height, and he moved with the easy grace of
an accomplished dancer. Masses of long dark hair crowned his finely
chiselled face; but what I noticed first and last was the pair of
lustrous, dark brown eyes that glowed and dilated with every deep
emotion. He had the quiet, assured manner of a master; yet I was not so
instantly conscious of that, as of an air of reverence and benignity,
which, combined with the somewhat Oriental tendency of feature and
colour, made his whole personality suggest that of a young poet-prophet
of Israel.

"So," he said, his English gaining piquancy from his slight lisp, "you
come from England--from dear England. I love your country greatly. It
has fog, and it is dark, too, for the sun forgets to shine at times;
but it is beautiful--like a picture, and when it smiles, what land is
sweeter?"

"You have many admirers in England, sir," I replied; "perhaps I may
rather say you have many friends there."

"Yes," he said, with a bright smile, "call them frie