attic window in the gabled roof.  I stood still.  A soft distinct note increased to loudness, diminished, died out, only to rise again immediately to penetrating shrillness.  It was always the same tone repeated as if the player dwelt upon it with pleasure.  At last an interval followed; it was the chord of the fourth.  While the player had before reveled in the sound of the single note, now his voluptuous enjoyment of this harmonic relation was very much more susceptible.  His fingers moved by fits and starts, as did his bow.  Through the intervening intervals he passed most unevenly, emphasizing and repeating the third.  Then he added the fifth, now with a trembling sound like silent weeping, sustained, vanishing; now constantly repeated with dizzy speed; always the same intervals, the same tones.  And that was what the old man called improvising.  It was improvising after all, but from the viewpoint of the player, not from that of the listener.

I do not know how long this may have lasted and how frightful the performance had become, when suddenly the door of the house was opened, and a man, clad only in a shirt and partly buttoned trousers stepped from the threshold into the middle of the street and called up to the attic window—­“Are you going to keep on all night again?” The tone of his voice was impatient, but not harsh or insulting.  The violin became silent even before the speaker had finished.  The man went back into the house, the attic window was closed, and soon perfect and uninterrupted silence reigned.  I started for home, experiencing some difficulty in finding my way through the unknown lanes, and, as I walked along, I also improvised mentally, without, however, disturbing any one.

The morning hours have always been of peculiar value to me.  It is as though I felt the need of occupying myself with something ennobling, something worth while, in the first hours of the day, thus consecrating the remainder of it, as it were.  It is, therefore, only with difficulty that I can make up my mind to leave my room early in the morning, and if ever I force myself to do so without sufficient cause, nothing remains to me for the rest of the day but the choice between idle distraction and morbid introspection.  Thus it happened that I put off for several days my visit to the old man, which I had agreed to pay in the morning.  At last I could not master my impatience any longer, and went.  I had no difficulty in finding Gardener’s Lane, nor the house.  This time also I heard the tones of the violin, but owing to the closed window they were muffled and scarcely recognizable.  I entered the house.  A gardener’s wife, half speechless with amazement, showed me the steps leading up to the attic.  I stood before a low, badly fitting door, knocked, received no answer, finally raised the latch and entered.  I found myself in a quite large, but otherwise extremely wretched chamber, the wall of which on all sides followed the