“No doubt,” he began, “you have heard of Court Councilor X?” Here he mentioned the name of a statesman who, in the middle of the last century, had under the modest title of a Chief of Department exerted an enormous influence, almost equal to that of a minister.  I admitted that I knew of him.  “He was my father,” he continued.—­His father!  The father of the old musician, of the beggar.  This influential, powerful man—­his father!  The old man did not seem to notice my astonishment, but with evident pleasure continued the thread of his narrative.  “I was the second of three brothers.  Both the others rose to high positions in the government service, but they are now dead.  Only I am still alive,” he said, pulling at his threadbare trousers and picking off some little feathers with downcast eyes.  “My father was ambitious and a man of violent temper.  My brothers satisfied him.  I was considered a slow coach, and I was slow.  If I remember rightly,” he continued, turning aside as though looking far away, with his head resting upon his left hand, “I might have been capable of learning various things, if only I had been given time and a systematic training.  My brothers leaped from one subject to another with the agility of gazelles, but I could make absolutely no headway, and whenever only a single word escaped me, I was obliged to begin again from the very beginning.  Thus I was constantly driven.  New material was to occupy the place which had not yet been vacated by the old, and I began to grow obstinate.  Thus they even drove me into hating music, which is now the delight and at the same time the support of my life.  When I used to improvise on my violin at twilight in order to enjoy myself in my own way, they would take the instrument away from me, asserting that this ruined my fingering.  They would also complain of the torture inflicted upon their ears and made me wait for the lesson, when the torture began for me.  In all my life I have never hated anything or any one so much as I hated the violin at that time.

“My father, who was extremely dissatisfied, scolded me frequently and threatened to make a mechanic of me.  I didn’t dare say how happy that would have made me.  I should have liked nothing better than to become a turner or a compositor.  But my father was much too proud ever to have permitted such a thing.  Finally a public examination at school, which they had persuaded him to attend in order to appease him, brought matters to a climax.  A dishonest teacher arranged in advance what he was going to ask me, and so everything went swimmingly.  But toward the end I had to recite some verses of Horace from memory and I missed a word.  My teacher, who had been nodding his head in approval and smiling at my father, came to my assistance when I broke down, and whispered the word to me, but I was so engrossed trying to locate the word in my memory and to establish its connection with the context, that I failed to hear