as he received, bore the stamp of his own mood. He was sensible, for
instance, in face of the picturesque houses that clustered together in
the centre of the town, of the spiritual GEMUTLICHKEIT, the absence of
any pomp or pride in their romantic past, which characterises the old
buildings of a German town. These quaint and stately houses, wedged
one into the other, with their many storeys, their steeply sloping
roofs and eye-like roof-windows, were still in sympathetic touch with
the trivial life of the day which swarmed in and about them. He
wandered leisurely along the narrow streets that ran at all angles off
the Market Place, one side of which was formed by the gabled RATHAUS,
with its ground-floor row of busy little shops; and, in fancy, he
peopled these streets with the renowned figures that had once walked
them. He looked up at the dark old houses in which great musicians had
lived, died and been born, and he saw faces that he recognised lean
out of the projecting windows, to watch the life and bustle below, to
catch the last sunbeam that filtered in; he saw them take their daily
walk along these very streets, in the antiquated garments of their
time. They passed him by, shadelike and misanthropic, and seemed to
steal down the opposite side, to avoid his too pertinent gaze. Bluff,
preoccupied, his keen eyes lowered, the burly Cantor passed, as he had
once done day after day, with the disciplined regularity of high
genius, of the honest citizen, to his appointed work in the shadows of
the organ-loft; behind him, one who had pointed to the giant with a
new burst of ardour, the genial little improviser, whose triumphs had
been those of this town, whose fascinating gifts and still more
fascinating personality, had made him the lion of his age. And
it was only another step in this train of half-conscious thought,
that, before a large lettered poster, which stood out black and white
against the reds and yellows of the circular advertisement-column, and
bore the word "Siegfried," Maurice Guest should not merely be filled