different from that in which his comrades won their spurs. It was only
when, with the end of his schooldays in sight, he was putting away
childish things, that he seriously turned his attention to the piano
and his hands. They were those of the pianist, broad, strong and
supple, and the new occupation soon engrossed him deeply; he gave up
all his spare time to it, and, in a few months, attained so creditable
a proficiency, that he went through a course of instruction with a
local teacher of music, who, scenting talent, dismissed preliminaries
with the assurance of his kind, and initiated his pupil into all that
is false and meretricious in the literature of the piano--the cheaply
pathetic, the tinsel of transcription, the titillating melancholy of
Slavonic dance-music--to leave him, but for an increased agility of
finger, not a whit further forward than he had found him. Then
followed months when the phantom of discontent stalked large through
Maurice's life, grew, indeed, day by day more tangible, more easily
defined; for there came the long, restless summer evenings, when it
seemed as if a tranquil darkness would never fall and bar off the
distant, the unattainable; and as he followed some flat, white country
road, that was lost to sight on the horizon as a tapering line, or
looked out across a stretch of low, luxuriant meadows, the very
placidity of which made heart and blood throb quicker, in a sense of
opposition: then the desire to have finished with the life he knew,
grew almost intolerable, and only a spark was needed to set his
resolve ablaze.

It was one evening when the summer had already dragged itself to a
close, that Maurice walked through a drizzling rain to the
neighbouring cathedral town, to attend a performance of ELIJAH. It was
the first important musical experience of his life, and, carried away
by the volumes of sound, he repressed his agitation so ill, that it