sit in your arm-chair with your feet on the fender, reading it not aloud on the piano, but to yourself, it conveys its definite meaning to you.  At your lessons you will have to read aloud to me.  But when you are reading to yourself, never pass over a bar that you don’t understand.  It has got to sound in your head, just as the words you read in a printed book really sound in your head if you read carefully and listen for them.  You know exactly what they would be like if you said them aloud.  Can you read, by the way?  Have a try.”

Falbe got down a volume of Bach and opened it at random.

“There,” he said, “begin at the top of the page.”

“But I can’t,” said Michael.  “I shall have to spell it out.”

“That’s just what you mustn’t do.  Go ahead, and don’t pause till you get to the bottom of the page.  Count; start each bar when it comes to its turn, and play as many notes as you can in it.”

This was a dismal experience.  Michael hitherto had gone on the painstaking and thorough plan of spelling out his notes with laborious care.  Now Falbe’s inexorable voice counted for him, until it was lost in inextinguishable laughter.

“Go on, go on!” he shouted.  “I thought it was Bach, and it is clearly Strauss’s Don Quixote.”

Michael, flushed and determined, with grave, set mouth, ploughed his way through amazing dissonances, and at the end joined Falbe’s laughter.

“Oh dear,” he said.  “Very funny.  But don’t laugh so at me, Hermann.”

Falbe dried his eyes.

“And what was it?” he said.  “I declare it was the fourth fugue.  An entirely different conception of it!  A thoroughly original view!  Now, what you’ve got to do, is to repeat that—­not the same murder I mean, but other murders—­for a couple of hours a day. . . .  By degrees—­you won’t believe it—­you will find you are not murdering any longer, but only mortally wounding.  After six months I dare say you won’t even be hurting your victims.  All the same, you can begin with less muscular ones.”

In this way Michael’s musical horizons were infinitely extended.  Not only did this system of Falbe’s of flying at new music, and going recklessly and regardlessly on, give quickness to his brain and finger, make his wits alert to pick up the new language he was learning, but it gloriously extended his vision and his range of country.  He ran joyfully, though with a thousand falls and tumbles, through these new and wonderful vistas; he worshipped at the grave, Gothic sanctuaries of Beethoven, he roamed through the enchanted garden of Chopin, he felt the icy and eternal frosts of Russia, and saw in the northern sky the great auroras spread themselves in spear and sword of fire; he listened to the wisdom of Brahms, and passed through the noble and smiling country of Bach.  All this, so to speak, was holiday travel, and between his journeys he applied himself with the same eager industry to the learning of his art, so that he might