often easy for a cultivated ear to detect whether a given composition has sprung from the brain of a Frenchman, a German, a Hungarian, a Russian.  The wildness of Bohemia, too, may be identified, or the vague sorrow of that northern melody which seems an echo of voices heard amid the fiords or in pale valleys near the farthest cape of Europe.  And then there is that large and lofty music of the stars and the spheres, of the mightiest passions and of the deepest imaginings, that is of no definite country, but seems to be of its own power and beauty, and not of the brain and heart of any one man.  It exists for eternity, and its creator can only wonder and worship before it, far from conceit as God was when He said, “Let there be light.”  Such music, too, is recognized on the instant by the men who have loved and studied the secrets of the most divine of the arts, for profound genius can utter itself as easily in five notes as in fifty.  But the prelude now played by Valentine was neither the great music that is of all time and of all countries, nor the music that is of any one country.  It was not even distinctively northern or southern in character, impregnated with the mystery of the tuneless, wonderful East, or with the peculiar homeliness that stirs Western hearts.  Both the doctor and Julian felt, as they listened, that it was music without an earthly home, without location, devoid of that sense of relation to humanity which links the greatness of the arts to the smallness of those who follow them.  Eccentric the music was, but the eccentricity of it seemed almost inhuman, so unmannerly as to be beyond the range of the most uncouth man, in advance of the invention of any mind, however coarse and criminal.  That was the atmosphere of this prelude, excessive, unutterable, crude, sombre vulgarity of a detached and remote kind.  As Levillier listened to it amazed, he found that he did not instinctively connect the vulgarity with any human traits, or translate the notes into acts within his experience.  He was simply conscious of being brought to the verge of some sphere in which the sordidness attained by our race would be sneered at as delicacy, in which our lowest grovellings of the pigsty would be as lofty flights through the skies.  And the hideous eccentricity of the music, its wanton desolation, deepened until both Levillier and Julian were pale under its spell, shrank from its ardent, its merciless and lambent sarcasm against all things refined or beautiful.  The prelude was as fire and sword, as plague and famine, as plunder and war, as all instruments that lay waste and that wound, a destroying angel before whose breath the first-born withered and the very sun shrivelled into a heap of grey ashes.