found her at her brother's grave. The sapling acacia by which they had buried Jules had grown into a fair young tree, and made of the place a pleasant green and gold shade, and laid a tapestry of soft colors over the sleeping soldier and shifted it and relaid it. Beyond the low bounding wall of the cemetery you could see that plain of pine forests and sandrents and the eternal hills above.

More gray had come into her hair, and his soul was ever entangled in the pathos of those gray strands. But her eyes were always hard, and he could not see the tumult of her heart.

"No," he cried again. "And now I will not take the answer."

Rittmeister Sponnagel was in Behnsleben once more. He had been again half across the world, and had looked Death in the eyes. Somewhere in his journey the thought had come to him that he was weary of that love riding pillion before him. Was it the care or the danger of his life that came between him and it? The pleasure it could not be: he had no such great pleasure in living. Was it the hopelessness of the thing? Was it that his solitude, hateful at first, had grown to be a treasure that he could not relinquish? He did not know: but the little thought grew stronger and stronger in him, until at last it was a conviction. He looked that love of his in the face: how pale and wan and old it had become! He lifted it down gently, with sighs, from the pillion of his heart, and rode on-alone.

her, and found that he wondered if he had not deceived himself all through. For some have defined love in chemical terms as a precipitate of gratitude: and the Rittmeister asked himself if love may not as often be a precipitate of compassion. But, in any case, when a man comes to analyze his love, that love is dead.

This time he did not put the old twice-asked question, but inquired of her life, and told her of his, and spoke of Jules. But his talk halted more and more, and at last ran out into silence: and he went away, melancholy and pensive. For looking into her eyes he had seen the softening there.

That evening Marie received a message asking her to go at once to the hospital. Rittmeister Sponnagel, said the messenger, had met with an accident. He had been crossing a road and in a fit of absent-mindedness had come into the way of a cart and had been run over. He had begged that Mademoiselle Genlis should be sent

for. When Marie asked if the accident was serious, the messenger only said that Ma'amzelle would do well to come at once.

Marie hurried to the hospital, which is the old Krankenhaus, instituted and maintained by the Benedictines in the days before charity was elevated into a public virtue. It has monastic suggestions: stone dials and sun-entrapping cloisters, an aged, time-wrenched mulberry-tree set on a square of green turf, low-arched doors and cobbled walks and window-work of delicate tracery. And the invalids in their gray wrappers creep about the old courts, shadows crawling into Eternity across the great dial of Time.

Here the head-surgeon came to meet Mademoiselle Genlis. Yes, he said, in answer to her look, it was bad. They had been obliged to amputate the crushed leg. The Rittmeister was not

yet aware of the full extent of the disaster that had come upon him; and if they could keep this knowledge from him until they had got up his strength a little, his system would be better able to endure the shock. But the Rittmeister had not spared himself these last years, and there was not much reserve of strength to draw upon. In fact, perhaps Mademoiselle Genlis would come at once.

She followed the doctor up through the wards to the room where the Rittmeister was stretched out, with that gray on his face which you only see at the dawn of the sun and at the dawn of eternity. His white hand lay outside the coverlet, and over his leg was a great hoop. He said that he was feeling better except for that numbness in his damaged limb. Then, with the usual cautions, the doctor and nurses left them together.

"Will you draw back the blind?" he said.

Now while she was at the window, that white hand of his stole underneath the coverlet, and the Rittmeister knew what had happened. It was a minute before Marie could find the blindcords, and when she came back to him the hand was on the coverlet again; Blackwood's Magazine.

but in that minute he had called to the ferryman, and the ferryman was putting his barge across the river of death.

The evening sun came in through the leaves and threw over the dying man's bed that same shifting tapestry of green and gold that it was laying at that moment about the Hussard of the Guard in the Friedhof. It was the hour of the sun's setting, and of men's setting.

"Sit," he said, "where I can see you."

She drew up a chair and sat by him. He looked into her eyes: yes, the softening was there upon which he had once set his whole happiness. He looked into his heart: his love was dead, not even on the brink of the grave to be quickened for a second from the dead past.

But she was crying.

He put out his hand, and she gave him hers. His tired arm sank on to the bed: but he always held her hand: and when at last his grasp loosened, he was dead.

That movement of compassion and friendship she took for a movement of love. And the Rittmeister had meant it to be taken so.

I cannot write articles about American music, because it does not exist. The only real American music was the negro minstrelsy of the South, and that is fast fading away, drowned in the noises of the great machine that is so busily moulding human society on this continent. They love music in America, there is no doubt of that; the wonderful curiosity which they apply to all the new and beautiful things that dawn upon an unfolding civilization is applied with more than usual intelli

gence to music, with the result that America possesses what is probably the finest orchestra and one of the finest operas in the world. They have amazing machinery for the production of music; the suave four-part minstrelsy of the South begat long ago the American organ, as the nearest and cheapest means of imitating it; and I am glad to think that America is already getting over the American-organ stage and has got into the piano stage-a considerably less vile and

painful condition.

It is unnecessary to say that the gramophone and the mechanical piano-player are here in all their glory, but I am not sure that the sensitive American ear will allow itself ever to be as much blunted or the growing soundness of American taste permit itself to be as much debauched by these contrivances as will the ear and taste of Germany and England.

The Americans have a damning and saving love of the superlative; they are quick to recognize their own limitations and to set about removing them; quick also to recognize their mistakes, and to set about correcting them. They love to have the best of everything; that best to which the prosperity of all their rolling fertile plains should entitle them; and in musicthat is to say in the performance of music-they get it. They have all the machinery of transmission and reception; the creative part of it they have not.

There are native composers here, native music-makers; but the thing they make is not American music. The giant children of the world, playing as yet with life and with art, and as yet ignorant what to do with either. Music has not had time to grow up in them; like the wines, the model hats and gowns, the best of all the civilized things they enjoy, it is imported; and, like some of these, it does not travel well. It is a part of the American genius to imitate, to observe intelligently what is being done elsewhere and to see if it cannot be done as well or better at home. And some things, like lavatories and barbers' shops, they do better here than in the old world; other things, like music, not so well.

I was fortunate enough to hear a concert of representative American music organized by Mr. David Bispham, the President of the American Music Society. The People's Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mr.

Franz Arens and the various composers whose works were being performed, played extremely well. This is the programme:

Prelude to the "Hamadryads"

William J. McCoy.

Four Songs with Viola Obligato Charles Martin Loeffler. Concerto in D minor for Piano and Orchestra Edward MacDowell. Ballad for Baritone Solo and Orchestra -"Lochinvar" George W. Chadwick. "Dawn," a Fantasie for Orchestra, after an Indian Legend

Arthur Farwell. Recitation with Orchestra, "The Raven" Arthur Bergh. Orchestral Dances, "Creole Days" Harry Rowe Shelley.

The composition of this programme is significant; it covers a wide range and ought to have been full of variety. As a matter of fact it was the most curiously monotonous performance that I have ever heard; and if one should have fallen asleep during one of the pieces (which would have been quite possible) and not wakened up until another one had begun one would hardly have noticed the difference. The only real piece of mature music was MacDowell's fine Piano Concerto; but even that is in no sense American music; it is purely German in its inspiration-and MacDowell is dead. The rest I can only describe on the whole as a striking example of commercial methods and ways of thought applied to the production of art. Do you like Debussy? Then try our American Debussy, Charles Martin Loeffler, who is now out on his spring journey, showing a strong line in unresolved discords, unrelated harmonies, little wriggling runs and all the latest external characteristics of the modern French composer. Do you want to go abroad for your Wagner, or will you have it right here? Whichever you like; but, before you decide, try our canned Wagner, picked and packed the

same day with all of the fragrance of the original German preserved. Are you interested in folk music? We have it here, with Creole, Indian, or negro flavoring as desired, and ready to serve. You cannot digest raw folk music, but after it has been through a special process in our factories a child could take it in. "There's a reason.”

This principle, which is so engaging and advantageous when applied to whiffled wheat or Boston pork and beans, does not work so happily in the case of music, nor can I think that the American public is under any considerable delusion about it. In New York and Boston they certainly know what good music is, and are probably aware that the line of goods supplied by most of the young men named in this programme is not going to create a very large market for itself. There is no reason why one should be contemptuous of such efforts, however; they are merely a sign of that love of technique which is one of the foundations of genius. Having heard much Wagner, for example, Mr. McCoy conceived the very noble and laudable ambition to write like Wagner; and, for my part, if composers are to imitate anyone I am quite content they should imitate Wagner if only they do it well enough. But even in their imitations they do not display half the cleverness and grasp of technique which our modern English school of composers has acquired. Mr. Loeffler's brand of Debussy is infinitely inferior to Mr. Cyril Scott's, and he lacks the originality which makes Mr. Cyril Scott a composer on his own account when he SO chooses. Mr. Chadwick's "Lochinvar" was a rather spirited, but otherwise undistinguished, exercise in that use of Scottish tonality which Mr. William Wallace has done SO exceedingly well; and, if one were looking for further parallels, one might put the music of The Saturday Review.

Mr. Farwell, Mr. Bergh and Mr. Shelley below that of Mr. Harty, Mr. Bantock, and Mr. German respectively -aud very far below it. I mention these names not because I think such comparisons either civil or illuminating, but merely to give my readers a standard by which to judge my impression of this representative American music. Edward MacDowell's Concerto of course is in quite another class. It is big and serious music, brilliantly written, and, if not of very deep originality, yet displaying a very sound and noble sense of the idiom of the greatest German composers. The Scherzo is a delicious movement, full of a kind of teasing unrest such as that which a breeze makes among great trees on a summer afternoon, and not without that little cadence of melancholy which all scherzos should have, which is the spirit of the same summer afternoon when the breeze is dying and the sunbeams slanting.

I think it not unlikely that the music of the future will come from this country, when its childish spirit shall have grown up and blossomed, when the torment of youth is over and it opens into a broad maturity. But in matters of art it seems to me not yet adolescent; the time of torment has not yet begun. Our giant children are still only children, and the torment of this place is a torment inflicted on the rest of the world rather than one felt in their own hearts. They are merely making a commotion and a racket in playing with all their gigantic toysplaying at building and throwing down the buildings as soon as they are fin. ished; playing at railways, playing at religion, playing at life, playing at art. For the moment we can only stop our ears; but when they grow a little more, when it is springtime in their hearts, we shall do well to listen, for assuredly they will have a message for the world.

Filson Young.