Sykes’s perennial doughnuts, and it was in a mood of supreme content that he settled into his quarters in the wilderness.  It was years since he had watched the on-coming of the New England summer; he watched it now with the trained sense, the inherent quickness of perception of the true artist who realizes that the simplest facts of the day’s routine by his touch can be transmuted into glowing, vivid material for his work.

It must be confessed that Eulaly Sykes occasionally mourned to her friends over the irregularities of her boarder.  His hours of work passed her comprehension, his work itself filled her soul with wonder and disgust.  In his moments of inspiration when he was evoking the stormy chords of the introduction to his symphonic poem, Bisesa he never dreamed that his landlady was craning her head up from her pillows in a vain effort to discover the tune, or to reduce it to the known terms of short metre rhythm.  His broken, irregular measures troubled her, as did also his broken, irregular hours of work.  There were days when he rode far afield, or was seen lying on his back under the pines by the brookside, listening to the splash of the water, the hissing of the air through the boughs above him.  After such days, his piano was wont to sound far into the night, and Eulaly, as she slept and waked and still heard her boarder’s fingers crashing over the keys, reproached herself bitterly.

“Them last doughnuts was too rich,” she used to say to her old-fashioned bolster, set up like a grim idol by the bedside; “and the poor feller can’t sleep.  I mustn’t put so much shortenin’ in the next ones.  My, but that was an awful scrooch!  I wish he’d shut his windows a little mite tighter, and not pester the whole neighborhood.”

This state of things had endured for two weeks, and the symphonic poem was progressing as well as its composer had any reason to expect.  Already it was bidding fair to rival the Alan Overture and Mr. Barrett began to carry his nose tilted at an angle higher than ever, as if in imagination he already scented the fresh laurels in store for him.  Pride goeth before destruction.  A long day under the pines resulted not in inspiration, but in an uninspiring cold in his head; his temper suffered together with his nose, and Eulaly Sykes, below stairs, chafed her hands together at the sounds of musical and moral discord which floated down upon her ears.  All the morning long, he smote his brows and his piano by turns.  The new motif he was seeking, refused to be found.

Later, fortified by Eulaly’s fried chicken and rhubarb pie, he tried it again, invitingly playing over the preceding motif in every possible key and tempo.  It was of no use.  He slammed down the top of his piano, tore across a half-finished page, caught up his cap, mounted his bicycle and rushed away up the road, quite regardless of the clouds lying low in the western sky.