long
tramps through the streets of the poorer quarters, resting himself in
little _traktirs_, finding unhealthy companionship in the patent
discontent, poverty, and misery of the laboring class. By five o'clock
he was in his own rooms again, and from then till ten he worked at piano
and desk, a samovar bubbling at his elbow. Promptly at the hour, the new
manuscript pages, beautifully finished, were locked away; and the piano
closed. Then, in the shadowy corners of his bedroom, devils began to
stir, and creep about, uneasily, waiting for their victim's nightly
attendance at his own torture, where he was set upon in some one of
their hundred ways. Fevered brain, weary body, tumbled bed; loneliness,
regret, heart-hunger, unsated ambition; most of all a longing for loving
arms to close about him, words of comfort and courage to come through
the darkness that thrilled only to his own stifled sighs--thus the
night, with its long dance of horned, fire-eyed beings, who held captive
all his angels of mental health, faith, hope, joyous life. And so at
last the presage of morning, when, for an hour or two, sleep would free
him from the bondage of his inner life--that ugly prison, whose black
walls were unbeautified by time, unsoftened by the clinging vines of
memory; whose stones were but made darker by the shadow of the banner
floating over all: the black flag of that "Tosca" that has unfurled
itself above so many of the world's great.

Autumn bursts of rain had whitened into snow. Moscow was now a city of
dazzling purity topped by steep roofs and domes of gold and azure and
water-green, so filling the air with brightness that one minded less the
persistent leaden gray of the vault overhead. But cold and grayness are
bad companions for the morbid-melancholic; and Ivan took his tone from
the clouds, steadily repulsing the gentle efforts of his friends to draw
him from his dim retreat into sunny mental climes.

The holidays went by, and Ivan began to realize that a few more weeks
would bring about a necessary farewell to two more of his
brain-children. It was the 2d of February before the Ophelia tone-poem
lay before him finished, polished to the last point of perfection.
Another week and "Isabella"--Kashkine's translation, his own
score--would receive its last stroke of the pen. Ivan waited till that
moment came, then laid his two beloved companions side by side in their
cabinet, turned the key, and left them there, while he far