tones measured, ordered, and restrained; varied and blended not by
chance, but by feeling and reason; sound expressive of the secret life
and the rhythmical emotion of the human heart. And this he found
flowing all around him, entering deeply into him, filling all the
parched and empty channels of his being, as he listened to
Beethoven's great Symphony in C Minor.

I

There was nothing between him and the orchestra. He looked over the
railing of the gallery, which shaded his eyes from the lights of the
boxes below, straight across the gulf in which the mass of the
audience, diminutive and indistinguishable, seemed to be submerged, to
the brilliant island of the stage.

The conductor stood in the foreground. There was no touch of carefully
considered eccentricity in hair or costume, no pose of self-conscious
Bohemianism about him. His face, with its clear brow, firmly moulded
chin, and brown moustache, was that of a man who understood himself as
well as music. His figure, in its faultless evening dress, had the
tranquil poise and force of one who obeys the customs of society in
order to be free to give his mind to other things. With slight
motions, easy and graceful as if they came without thought and
required no effort, his right hand, with the little baton, gave the
time and rhythm, commanding swift obedience; while his left hand
lightly beckoned here and there with magical persuasion, drawing forth
louder or softer notes, stirring the groups of instruments to
passionate expression, or hushing them to delicate and ethereal
strains.

There was no labour, no dramatic display in that leadership; nothing
to distract the attention, or to break the spell of the music. All the
toil of art, the consideration of effects, the sharp and vehement
assertion of authority, lay behind him in the rehearsals.

Now the finished work, the noble interpretation of the composer's
musical idea, flowed forth at the leader's touch, as if each motive
and phrase, each period and melody, were waiting somewhere in the air
to reveal itself at his slight signal. And through all the movement of
the _Allegro con brio_, with its momentous struggle between Fate and
the Human Soul, the orchestra answered to the leader's will as if it
were a single instrument upon which he played.

[Illustration: The Music-Lover.]

And so, for a time, it seemed to the Music-Lover as he looked down
upon it from his lofty place. With what precision the bows of th