SNAP and rattle of short-arm, white kid-glove musketry. Through a little door at one side of the stage the conductor enters. Frock-coat, tall, slender; beaked nose, pointed chin, a dandy captain of Imperial Uhlans, you would say, or eminent author of contributions to the history of the passive verb in Sanskrit.

The conductor mounts his little pulpit. Diminutive pulpit about three feet by three, a dizzy perch. Some day a temperamental conductor, taking coda of Tschaikovsky's Sixth at high speed, will lose his balance and fall off to the moaning of the cellos. Expectation of such an event is always one of the elements of suspense in symphonic music.

The conductor mounts his pulpit. He bows forward like a Parsee adoring the sun, then forty-five degrees to the right, then forty-five degrees to the left, and his smoldering eyes fall on piled-up waves of feminine millinery on the orchestra floor. The conductor apparently wonders whether the feminine waves will sweep over the stage and wash away the gallant little Spartan band of first violins, second violins, trombonists, etc., upholding the oriflamme of the male sex. He evidently makes up his mind there

About

face! Rap, rap, Ready? Go! A of defiance at the Come one, come

is no danger. rap of baton on desk! horn lets out a blare serried female ranks. all! The challenge is reinforced by timpani and kettledrums breathing defiance, scorn, vituperation, contempt, war of the sexes, and then pity, as the violins begin to sing the sorrow of it all.

At the first sound of the bugle the torrent of babbling sound in the audience, quite like the waters over the precipice at Lover's Leap, is hushed to the murmur of brook over beds of pebbles, and so to silence. Simultaneously the flutter of millinery simmers down to gentle undulation, and so to immobility. The violins sing on their Weltschmerz. I am fearfully lonely. In the same row, F, only thirty seats away, there is another man, and there are two men back in the shadow of the balcony, present either by mistake. or by compulsion, gentle or other. A wireless S. O. S. of sympathy flashes through ether among us four lonely survivals of a sex. The sense of loneliness increases, probably due to the violins reciting in the minor key of the Little Russians.

Most extraordinary plumage in the world is the plumage on ladies' bonnets.

No apparent relation whatever to principles or practice of ornithology. The same is true of foliage in millinery: no relation whatever between crown and stem, between wearer and worn. In the vegetable kingdom your palm-fronds bespeak the nature of the palm trunk; a dark gable of evergreen is eminently suitable to the trunk of fir or pine; an elaborate network of ropes and tendrils and creepers is quite appropriate to the nature of a baniantree: but no such harmony here.

Women do not wear hats. Hats are just affixed. I imagine a huge scythe swinging through the auditorium, deftly shaving off elaborate head-gear, and the effect is most pleasing, the removal of an

excrescence.

Amazing, this dead array of plumagefeathers like a fern, feathers like a fan, feathers like a clam-shell, feathers like a stick of celery; and beneath them,-can one believe it?-thoughts, temperaments, passions, dreams, minds! Amazing! What a wonderful gift is a milliner's! A touch here and a pin there, and behold a masterpiece nature cannot match-a tower of Babel, a pancake, swooping pinion of a bird of prey, a visible typewriter, a man-of-war, a pagoda, a beefsteak pie, a lyre, a bass viol of the Christmas kind in confectionery stores! And now the bass viols are grunting away like mad, drowning out the timorous flutes, voicing the dyspepsia of the universe.

No?

I assume it's cosmic dyspepsia. Well, here's the program, with detailed analysis. Alas! here, too, the experts differ. Schmuck says andante in this particular symphony represents the master passing from a period of storm and stress into the peace of reconciliation. Farinetti differs. He insists that andante here is intended to mirror dawn after a night of heavy rain on the coast of Dalmatia, high notes on strings representing shimmer of first rays of sun on blue waters of Adriatic near Ragusa. Branitsky says no. Andante represents the retreat from MosCOW. But the retreat from Moscow evidently cannot be andante. The retreat from Moscow should evidently be scherzo prestissimo.

The composer's own utterances on the disputed point are unfortunately vague. In a letter to Du Pontrace the composer says that this particular movement was

written during an unhappy love-episode. In a letter to Hatzfeld he speaks of rheumatism. No matter. As absolute music the andante is beautiful; it saddens, soothes, leads on to reverie.

Another extraordinary fact about women's hats is this: they are apparently adapted to the greatest unhappiness of the greatest number. Tall women, who might wear lofty plumes, and so harmlessly brush the tops of derbies, prefer short feathers, which get into the ear in the subway and scratch. Small women, who ought to wear squat plumes, and so do no mischief, go in for long quills, which get under male chins and tickle. Between tickling and sneezing who shall choose? Respectable men in the subway frequently laugh into the faces of strange women not because they want to, but because the effect of feather brushing against the upper lip is irresistible.

In masculine breasts the wild desire to retaliate on tickling feathers frequently arises. Something more than biting off the plume or pinning it down. The desire, say, to pay back by growing a beard two feet long and letting it hang over the shoulder of ladies armed with irritating plumes. A dangerous experiment, however. There are the pins.

Up and down sweep bows over strings, chanting nasal, silvery chorals in praise of man's capacity to send his soul forth to dwell amidst the clouds. O mind of man that is Beethoven! Deaf as a post, and his brain was glutted on the ravishment of melody. It heard everything-love, wrath, pity, laughter, sobs, crackle of fire on the hearth, and the thunderous march of the world-conqueror. In the beginning was the idea. Beethoven, deaf, heard with his brain. Turner, blind, saw with his brain. And who was it who conquered empires from his litter?

After half an hour with Beethoven, I could do it myself.

Soul, temperament, passion? Fiddlesticks! Give me mind to conceive music, and perfect vibratory organs to produce the necessary wave-lengths. Temperament? Bosh! Behold a hundred ordinary men at forty-five dollars a week playing the deuce with my heartstrings in sunlit spaces of radiant enchantment. During the intermission people say they drink beer. Twenty-five dollars a week

and no temperament; forty-five dollars a week and a rehearsal every day, and they play together like the angels.

That time the conductor nearly fell off. Crash, blare, bang, and crash, and blare, and bang, and the elegant captain of Uhlans, disguised as Kapellmeister, turns around, salaams and disappears through a little door at the side.

Once more there rises a Lover's Leap of voices in the auditorium, following upon a general sigh and heaving of shoulders, stirring, nodding of plumage-positively I will not be drawn into a consideration of millinery. Only, as woman turns to woman for confidence or platitude, I feel lonely once more. The man

Very little, apparently. A queer story he tells, a whimpering, querulous narrative, rehearsing his grievances, though angry at no one in particular; "tapestry in sound" they have called it.

But, then, it's all explained in the program. Queer thing this about your arts! When they want to say something really significant, they must step out and borrow something from a neighboring art. Poets use colors; painters paint sound; music in its highest, symphonic form must use words to explain itself. Not quite ideal the business of a descriptive program, but useful. Read, and things grow plain. A horn-blast is the hero's challenge to fate: dark notes on violas represent fa

at the other end of Row F is visible, but the two under the balcony are submerged. The oppressed sex! What rot! Three thousand five hundred women have been journeying on the wings of ecstasy, while their husbands, four miles farther down on 3roadway, have recited "Yours of the 6th ultimo to hand, and in reply would state" the same dead and dreary facts and lies they have been stating six days in the week, fifty weeks in the year, year in and year out. Woman's sphere? Yes, the home, and the music-hall, and the art gallery, and the library, and the shops full of new, glistening, shimmering things, among others, feathers-but I am determined not to. Rattle of kid-glove musketry, and captain of Uhlans reappears. He bows. Rat, tat, tat! Go, muted, sibilant violins! Let us hear what this decadent French maestro has to say.

tal princess drinking poison of her own brewing after setting fire to the palace on the triangles. Pardon! We are on the wrong page. Here we are, now, page 8. What we have heard is spring in the woodland and the bird calling to her mate. Useful things, programs, but disastrous when the finger strays.

And now crash, bang, ting-a-ling, bang! Love triumphs over death! Captain of Uhlans bows ritually, there comes a sharp fire of kid-glove musketry, and the feminine sea upheaves, and the Spartans on the platform dash for the rear entrance. The feminine tide pours out into the street.

A waving sea of plumes, feathers, wings, cockscombs, tufts, tails, panaches (be with me, Roget!), cilia, fimbria, crests, manes, pinions, quills, feathers; and on this ebbing tide, bobbing here and there, a castaway derby.