of devout families; they were able to earn their bread by an art conscientiously studied, and consequently they soon got places as organists and Chapel-masters; the Chapters really fought for them.  Some were more venturesome, and, anxious to see more of that musical world which had seemed to them while in their convents a vision of Paradise, entered the orchestras of theatres, many travelling even to Italy, transforming themselves so entirely that even their own former prior could not have recognised them.  One of these was my little father.  What a man!  He was a good Christian, but he had thrown himself so thoroughly into music that he retained very little of the former friar.  When he was told that probably the convents would be re-established, he shrugged his shoulders with indifference, a new sonata interested him much more.  He sometimes said things that have always lived in my memory.  I remember one day when I was a child he took me to a meeting of musical friends in Madrid, who played, for their own pleasure only, the famous ‘Seventh Symphony.’  Do you know it?  It is the freshest and most graceful of all Beethoven’s works.  I remember my little father leaving the room quite wrapped up in himself, with his head bent, dragging me along, for I could hardly keep up with his long footsteps, and when we got home he looked at me fixedly, as though I had been a grown-up person.  ‘Listen, Luis,’ he said, ’and remember this well.  There is only one Lord in the world, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and there are two lesser lords, Galileo and Beethoven.’”

The musician looked lovingly at the plaster bust which faced the room from one corner, with its leonine brows and the diffident eyes of a deaf person.

“I do not know much about Galileo,” continued Don Luis.  “I know that he was a very wise man, and a scientific genius.  I am only a musician and I know very little about other things, but I adore Beethoven, and I think my little father did the same—­he is a god; the most extraordinary man the world has ever produced.  Don’t you think so, Gabriel?”

His nerves were quivering with his excitement, and getting up, he walked rapidly up and down the room, trampling on all the loose sheets of music.

“Ay! how I envy you, Gabriel, having travelled so much, and having heard so many good things!  The other night I could not sleep for thinking of all you had told me about your life in Paris—­those beautiful Sunday afternoons when you would go to the Lamoureax concerts, or sometimes to Colonnas, giving yourself a surfeit of sublimity!  And here am I, shut up, my only hope being perhaps to conduct a Mass of Rossini’s at one of the great festivals!  My only comfort is to read music, instructing myself thoroughly in those great works that so many fools in the towns can listen to half asleep and bored.  Here I have, in this pile, the nine symphonies of the great man—­his innumerable sonatas, his masses, and together with him, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, in fact all the great writers.  I have even Wagner.  I read them, and I play what is possible on the harmonium.  But—­it is just as if you were to describe the drawing and colours of a picture to a blind man, buried in this cloister.  I know, blindly, that there are most beautiful things in this world—­for those who can hear them.”