eye:  the architects of the Alhambra painted on each of their bricks a graceful little poem; the gypsies adorn each note with melodious designs and luxuriant embroideries.  But (we quote M. Franz throughout) who shall describe the impalpable flame of Tzigany sentiment, the strange, subjugating charm of which is a vital animation almost adequate to life itself? or the mysterious equilibrium which reigns in this undisciplined art between the sentiment and the form?  Mystery of genius, which bears in itself its inexplicable power of emotion, and which science and taste in vain deny!

When Franz again heard Tzigany music it was under very different circumstances.  A fete was given by a Hungarian gentleman, of which this music was to be one of the attractions, the most distinguished performers being Farkas Miska and Remenyi Ede.  The arrival of the latter on the morning after the first evening concert (the fete seems to have lasted some days) was announced to M. Franz by a great noise, a banging of doors and windows and moving of furniture in the room next his own.  It at length ceased, and he was just getting to sleep again when some one knocked at his door, and a pretty, fair-haired boy entered, who announced himself as Ptolemyi Nandor, the fervent disciple of Remenyi Ede, who, he said, had just arrived and was about to take possession of the adjoining apartment.

“Well, sir, is it to inform me of your name and your fervor that you have come to prevent me from sleeping?”

“No,” said the boy decidedly:  “it is to ask you to dress yourself and go out for a walk.”

To the astonished exclamation of M. Franz he replied that his master wished to practice, beginning early, and that it annoyed him to have any one hear him.

“Go to the devil, you and your master!” naturally shouted our composer.

The boy became purple.  “What!” he said, “send him to the devil?—­him, the great violinist, the successor of Czemak, of Bihary!”

“Is your master a gypsy?”

“No, but he is the only living violinist who possesses the authentic tradition of gypsy music.”

“I love this music; therefore I will get up and go down to the garden.”

“Oh no, sir:  go into the fields.  See!” and he opened the window, “every one has left the castle.”  And actually the master of the house and his guests were all defiling through the garden-gate, having had only three hours’ sleep.  M. Franz soon joined them, and heard from them the story of Remenyi.

At the age of seventeen he had been attached to the person of Goergey during the Hungarian war.  Leaving his country with the emigration, he had shared the exile of Count Teleki, Sandor and others; then passed some time at Guernsey, where he knew Victor Hugo.  He had afterward performed with brilliant success in London, Hamburg, etc., and his renown, after his return to Hungary, went on increasing.  He traveled about the country in every direction, astonishing nobles and peasants, and playing with the same enthusiasm and poetry in barns as in palaces.  On hearing this our author slipped back to the garden, where he hid himself to listen to Remenyi, who, to his great disgust, was playing a concerto of Bach’s.