The Little Schoolmaster Mark

He was at least so far a genius that he kn

crificial knife. But a god intervenes. Veiled in cloud and recognised in thunders, a divine and merciful hand is laid upon the child. Death comes to him as a sleep, and over his dead and lovely form the anger of heaven is appeased. Incapable as the Maestro was of feeling much of the pathos and beauty of his own work, still, with that wonderful instinct, or art, or genius, which supplies the place of feeling, he produced, amid much that was grotesque and incongruous, a work of delicate touch and thrilling and entrancing sound. The little theatre near the Kohl market, where the piece was first produced, was crowded nightly, and the narrow thoroughfares

canary," the Maestro wa

at at least of pure and lasting fruit. He had attired his withered and lean figure in brilliant hues and the finest lace, and in this attire he trained the girl, also fantastically dressed, to warble the most touching and delicious plaints. The instinctive pathos of inanimate thi

the Signorina varied her notes; but, in fact, the score of the opera never remained the same-at least as regarded her parts. As she sang, with the Maestro beside her at the harpsichord, imagination and recollection, instructed by the magi

ce suggesting possibilities of more melodious, more artistic pathos to the composer, the girl's passionate instinct recognising th

y the discovery of this power of realisation and expressi

mes, starting away from the harpsichord

y tone; "you cannot help but sing: and when did love and sorrow feel so

ang over again, to the perfect satisfact

was till I learned to sing from you. Every day I learn more what love is; I feel eve

it is strange to me, I confess it, how pathetically you sing. It is not in the music-at any

n odd gesture, in which something like self-c

d, and was looking at him wit

e you always for your music, in spite of your

rming, indeed, a passionate regard for th

h an event had occurred, for unselfish love is