‘You build a cathedral of sound in the organ,’ said Dr. Shrapnel, casting out a league of leg as he sat beside his only half-persuaded fretful guest.  ’You subject the winds to serve you; that’s a gain.  You do actually accomplish a resonant imitation of the various instruments; they sing out as your two hands command them—­trumpet, flute, dulcimer, hautboy, drum, storm, earthquake, ethereal quire; you have them at your option.  But tell me of an organ in the open air?  The sublimity would vanish, ma’am, both from the notes and from the structure, because accessories and circumstances produce its chief effects.  Say that an organ is a despotism, just as your piano is the Constitutional bourgeois.  Match them with the trained orchestral band of skilled individual performers, indoors or out, where each grasps his instrument, and each relies on his fellow with confidence, and an unrivalled concord comes of it.  That is our republic each one to his work; all in union!  There’s the motto for us!  Then you have music, harmony, the highest, fullest, finest!  Educate your men to form a band, you shame dexterous trickery and imitation sounds.  Then for the difference of real instruments from clever shams!  Oh, ay, one will set your organ going; that is, one in front, with his couple of panting air-pumpers behind—­his ministers!’ Dr. Shrapnel laughed at some undefined mental image, apparently careless of any laughing companionship.  ’One will do it for you, especially if he’s born to do it.  Born!’ A slap of the knee reported what seemed to be an immensely contemptuous sentiment.  ’But free mouths blowing into brass and wood, ma’am, beat your bellows and your whifflers; your artificial choruses—­crash, crash! your unanimous plebiscitums!  Beat them?  There’s no contest:  we’re in another world; we’re in the sun’s world,—­yonder!’

Miss Denham’s opening notes on the despised piano put a curb on the doctor.  She began a Mass of Mozart’s, without the usual preliminary rattle of the keys, as of a crier announcing a performance, straight to her task, for which Rosamund thanked her, liking that kind of composed simplicity:  she thanked her more for cutting short the doctor’s fanatical nonsense.  It was perceptible to her that a species of mad metaphor had been wriggling and tearing its passage through a thorn-bush in his discourse, with the furious urgency of a sheep in a panic; but where the ostensible subject ended and the metaphor commenced, and which was which at the conclusion, she found it difficult to discern—­much as the sheep would, be when he had left his fleece behind him.  She could now have said, ‘Silly old man!’

Dr. Shrapnel appeared most placable.  He was gazing at his Authority in the heavens, tangled among gold clouds and purple; his head bent acutely on one side, and his eyes upturned in dim speculation.  His great feet planted on their heels faced him, suggesting the stocks; his arms hung loose.  Full many a hero of the alehouse, anciently amenable to leg-and-foot imprisonment in the grip of the parish, has presented as respectable an air.  His forelock straggled as it willed.