...  It is hard for one to realize how little music Bedient had heard in his life.  Just a few old songs—­always unfinished—­but they had haunted the depths of him, and made him think powerfully.  Certain strains had loosed within him emotions, ancient as world-dawns to his present understanding, but intimate as yesterday to something deeper than mind.  And so he came to ask; “Are not all the landmarks of evolution identified with certain sounds or combinations of sounds?  Is there not an answering interpretation in the eternal scroll of man’s soul, to all that is true in music?”

Long ago, one night in Korea, he had been wakened by the yammering of a tigress.  His terror for a moment had been primal, literally a simian’s helpless quaking.  Earlier still, he had heard a hoot-owl, and encountered through it, his first realization of phantom horrors; he knew then there was an Unseen, and nether acoustics; here was a key to ghostly doors.  A mourning-dove had brought back in a swift passage of consciousness the breast of some savage mother.  Night-birds everywhere meant to him restless mystery....  Is sound a key to psychology?  Is the history of our emotions, from monster to man, sometime to be interpreted through music—­as yet the infant among the arts?

The answer had come—­why the unfinished songs had the greater magic for him.  So diaphanous and ethereal is this marvellously expressive young medium, music, that the composers could only pin a strain here and there to concrete form—­as a bit of lace from a lovely garment is caught by a thorn.  So they build around it—­as flesh around spirit.  But it was the strain of pure spirit that sang in Bedient’s mind—­and knew no set forms.  So an artistic imagination can finish a song or a picture, many times better than the original artist could with tones or pigments.  Too much finish binds the spirit, and checks the feeling of those who follow to see or hear.

These, and many thoughts had come to him from the unpretentious things of music.... Ben Bolt brought back the memory of some prolonged and desperate sorrow.  The lineaments of the tragedy were effaced, but its effect lived and preyed upon him under the stress of its own melody.  Once he had heard Caller Herrin’ grandly sung, and for the time, the circuit was complete between the Andrew Bedient of Now, and another of a bleak land and darker era.  In this case the words brought him a clearer picture—­gaunt coasts and the thrilling humanity of common fisher folk....  Many times a strain of angelic meaning and sweetness was yoked to a silly effigy of words; but he rejoiced in opposite examples, such as that little lullaby of Tennyson’s, Sweet and Low, which J. Barnby seemed to have exactly tono-graphed....  Once across infantry campfires, Juanita came, with a bleeding passion for home—­to him who had no home.  There was a lyrical Ireland very dear to him—­songs and poems which wrung