the opening bars before a slight a slight change in the attitude of the Princess attracted my eyes, and suddenly, as if by inspiration, I conceived the fancy that I was playing to a creature of the forest and of the wind. She was sitting slightly forward, her eyes fixed upon the woodland slope before her, her slight, lithe figure and prominent speaking features like no offspring of common clay, but innate in that primeval god-sprung race of the golden hours, before the iron hornyhanded sons of men had filled the earth with toil and sorrow and grime: the race from which had sprung the creatures that had filled romance with elf-legends and stories of elf-kings and ladies, and beings of gentle and fairy birth; for, as the untrammelled woodnotes that stole across the strings now sunk into a whisper, now swelled into full, rich chords and harmonies, I could almost fancy that I saw this glorious creature, while the mystic notes lasted, grow into a more serene and genial life, as though she breathed an air to which she was native, and heard once again the wild notes of the hills and of the winds in the sere antique forest-country that was hers by right of royal ancient birth.

As I played the concluding notes the Princess rose and stood before us once again, as I had seen her stand in the forest-meadow when she had pleaded unavailingly, in those marvellous tones which would never pass from my memory, for the beautiful stag. Then she bowed very courteously to the others and, taking no notice whatever of me, moved away, attended by her companion.

II.

NARRATIVE.

THERE is a gap in Otto von Saale's autobiography, which it may be well to fill up from other sources, as we shall by this means obtain a knowledge of some incidents of which he

could not possibly have been cognisant.

Two or three days after the rehearsal in the palace-garden the Princess was seated in her own room in the palace, accompanied only by her reader. The relationship between the two was evidently, in private, of the most intimate character.

The room was high in the palace and a surpassing view lay before the windows. Immediately in front, over a terrace or glacis planted with sycamore trees, the roofs and gables and chimneys of the old city lay like a great snake, or rather like several great snakes, climbing the ridges of its steep streets, and crowned with the spires and towers of its cathedral and churches and rathhaus and university halls. Over

and beyond this stretched a vast extent of wooded valleys and hills, of forest and mountain and glancing river, of distant blue stretches of country indistinguishable and unknown, and in the remote distance along the sky-line a faint range of snow-clad peaks. A vast expanse of cloudland, strange and varied as the earth itself, and almost as tangible and real, filled the upper regions of this landscape with motion and life and varied form. It was evening, and the night-clouds had piled themselves in threatening and lurid forms above the dark wind-tossed forest-land. The white smoke-wreaths from the city curled up before the cathedral towers, and the storks and kites in long trailing flocks wended their way home from the distant fields. The Princess sat, still and silent, looking out over the wide prospect, with searching-questioning eyes, that seemed to penetrate beyond its furthest bound.

though they were the voices of my kin, that told me whence I came, and who I was, and what I might become."

"He plays with surpassing feeling," replied Adelheid, "and with delicacy of shading and of touch, most surprising as he is only a novice at the violin. You may judge of this when you remember how simple the piece was that he played-a few chords constantly repeated-yet he made them, as you say, speak to the heart, a different utterance for every chord. His forte is expression."

"Is he in love with you?" said the Princess, with the calmest, most unmoved manner and tone.

"You are in love with him?"

"Yes, I love him, for he is in every way worthy to be loved. But it is of little importance what I think of him. He is hopelessly, desperately, passionately in love with you."

"In love with me?" The Princess did not move, and not the faintest shade of deeper colour flushed her cheek; but the faint, shy, kindly smile deepened, and the questioning eyes softened to an expression which was certainly that of supreme, amused, beneficence possibly of something something else. "In love with me! When did he ever see me before?"

"He saw you some days ago in the forest the day that the Prince von Schongau shot the stag."

The Princess sat quite still, looking out upon the southern sky, which was all aglow with a red reflected light. Long dark lines of cloud, like bars of some Titanic prison-house, drew themselves out across the sky; and the masses of cloud, tinged with a sudden glow of crimson, formed a wild contrast with the faint blue of the dying sky, and the green of the waving woodlands below. The deepening glow spread higher over the whole heaven, till the world below became suffused with its sober brilliance, and tower and gable and the climbing ridges of the street and the white smoke-wreaths No. 337.-VOL. LVII.

shone in the mellow light. The distant stretch of country flushed with this mystic light, which certainly was not of earth, seemed instinct with а quivering life-the life of forest and farm-people-the life of hidden townships too distant to be discerned-of rivers bordered with wharves and shipping the life of a kingdom of earth and, in her mountain eyrie, with set, wistful eyes, over the regions of her father's rule, the Princess sat at gaze, a creature slight, shy, delicate, yet born of eagle-race.

Her companion waited for some words, but they did not come: then she spoke herself.

"He was born among the forests of the Fichtelgeberge and has listened to the spirits of the wood and mountain from a child; that is why he plays so well."

Yes," said the Princess, "that is why, in his playing, I heard a talk that I had long wished to hear-a speech which seemed familiar and yet which I had never heard here-the speech of a people from which my race is sprung. And you say that he is in love with me?

"Yes," said Adelheid, somewhat sadly: "at this moment he would give worlds to see you again."

"Oh, he shall see me again!" said the Princess, with her quaint, shy smile: "he shall see me again : he shall play before the King. More than that, -he shall marry you!"

The King was a strikingly handsome, tall, distinguished man, of between fifty and sixty years of age. His father had died when he was a boy, and he had been brought up by his mother as regent of the kingdom. She was a very clever woman and surrounded her son with the most superior men she could attract to her court. She trained him in the most exalted ideas of his position and responsibility, and when she died, after having with much difficulty found a wife whom she considered to be suitable for him, she left him, at the

C

may surprise some persons to be told how wonderfully the country prospered under this imposing, but silent and inactive monarch. He had been as a boy impressed with the misery of some classes of his people, and he had been known as a young man to absent himself from court for days together and to wander, attended only by one companion, among the poor and struggling classes; and the only occasions on which he spoke at the privy-council were when he advocated the passing of some measure which his plain common sense told him would be beneficial to his people. He was therefore immensely popular and was thought, even by many of his familiar courtiers, to be a man of remarkable ability. He had a habit of repeating the last words of any one who spoke to him with an air by which he seemed to appropriate all the wisdom which might be contained in them to himself.

"I have been attending the privy-council, sire.” "Ah! you have been attending the privy-council, yes." And it really was difficult not to fancy that you had been listening to a long and exhaustive treatise upon privy-councils generally and their influence on the government of states; so perfect was the manner of the King.

"Sire," said the Princess to her father, the same evening on which she had had the talk with Adelheid, "I wish you to hear a young performer on the violin, Otto von Saale, who is a pupil of Herr Veitch. I heard him once by accident in Das Vergnügen. I wish him," continued the Princess,

with serene candour, after a slight pause, "I wish him to marry the Fraulein."

"Yes?" said the King, "you wish him to marry the Fraulein? I have observed, on more than one occasion, that efforts of this character may be abortive."

The King paused, as though on the point of saying more, but apparently doubting whether he could safely venture upon further assertion, he remained silent. After a pause he went on: "You consider this young man to be a promising performer?"

66

"His forte," replied the Princess, as the Fraulein says, is expression. His playing has a strange fascination for me."

"Ah!" replied the King, "his forte is expression. Good! When do you wish me to hear this young man?" he continued after a pause.

"I thought we might have a chamber-concert of music after supper, on one of the evenings that the Prince von Schongau is here. Herr Veitch and the Fraulein will play."

Except on occasions of great state the King and his family supped in private, a second table being provided for the courtiers. A strict etiquette was observed in the palace, similar to, and founded upon, that of Versailles.

On the evening upon which the Princess had finally decided, a somewhat larger company than usual assembled in the great salle. The doors were thrown open shortly after supper, and the chamberlain with his white wand announced, after the manner of the French Court: "Gentlemen! The King!"

The great salle was floored with marble, and surrounded with marble pillars on every side. A thousand lights flickered on the countless jewels that decked the assembly. Great vases of flowers filled the corners, and graced the tables of the room.

The King came forward with long accustomed composure to the seat provided for him, near to a harpsichord in the centre of the salle: a

step behind him followed the Princess. She was en pleine toilette, sparkling with jewels, and if Otto von Saale had had any worlds to give, he might almost have been pardoned had he given them for such a sight; for a creature more delicately beautiful-so absolutely set apart and pure from aught that is frivolous and vain, and yet so winning in the unconscious piquancy of her loveliness-he would scarcely find elsewhere. She was followed by several ladies, and three or four gentlemen, preceded by a prince of a royal house, who had formed part of the King's supperparty, brought up the rear of the procession.

The King sat in his chair a little in advance of the rest on either side of him were seated the Princess and the Crown Prince, and the ladies and gentlemen who had had the honour of supping with the royal party were seated behind them. Herr Veitch played the violoncello, and the Professor was prepared to accompany on the harpsichord, so far as that instrument was capable of accompanying the violins.

The attitude and expression of the King were delightful to watch. He sat back in his chair, his fingers meeting before his chest, a faint smile of serene beneficence on his beautifully cut features a gracious, presiding power of another and a loftier sphere.

One or two pieces were played first, then came a trio of Corelli's, in which the harpsichord took no part.

Did it sound in the Princess's ear alone, or did there run through all the wealth of pure harmonies a strange new quality of tone? Wild, glancing, in tune yet untuned and untunable, like the silver thread of the brooklet through the grass, or the single changeless woodnote of the breeze wailing through the organ-harmonies of the midnight mass in a mountain-chapel. It spoke to the Princess's heart, as she sat some little space backward from her father's chair, her delicate steadfast face fixed upon the scene

before her, which, doubtless, she did not see. It seemed to speak of an alluring lawlessness, of that life of unconventional freedom, of that lofty rule and dominion over their own fate and circumstance, of that free gratification of every instinct and faculty, which has such an attraction to the highly-born. It seemed to call her with a resistless power back into a pristine life of freedom which was hers by right of ancient ancestral birth, a world of freedom and love and unquestioned prerogative which belonged to the nobles of the golden age. Almost she was persuaded by the searching power of its magic note to believe that all things belonged to the élite of earth's children-the favourites of life, those delicately nurtured and born to the purple of the world's prismatic rays. Should she listen to this siren chord it might even happen to her to lose that stainless insight which its wild tone had itself evoked; but, in the perfection of a concerted piece, its wild uniqueness was kept by grace of finished art in pitch and vibration true to the dominant concord of pure harmony, an existence and creation as it were in harmonious sound, of which it formed a part. To the Princess as she listened to the vibrating strings. it seemed that, with a vision beyond her years, so potent in suggestion is music, she looked into another world, as one looks down from a lofty precipitous height into the teeming streets of a great city, and the pigmy crowds are instinct with a strange interest-a world of human suffering and doubt and terror, of love unrequited, of righteousness unrecognised, of toil and sorrow and despair unrelieved, until, in the thronged theatres and market-places, where life stands waiting its abiding doom-the times and seasons of the world's harvest being fully ripe the riddle of righteousness and of wrong is answered, and in the sad grey dawn of the eternal day the dividing sickle is put in,

There was a pause in the wave of sound, and the Princess was dimly

conscious that playing alone.

Otto von Saale was So magnetic was the searching tone that there seemed nothing in the wide universe save herself and his strange impalpable personality that approached her in mystic sound; but happily beyond and above its sorcery was once more felt the sense of restraining, abiding, cultured harmony-the full, true, settled chords, and the according regular law and sequence of time and pitch.

Then she knew that all were standing up, and she rose in her seat by the side of the King. A peculiar lustre of gracious courtesy shone in the Monarch's attitude and manner. "Herr Veitch," he was saying, "we thank you: the Princess thanks you. I perceive" here his Majesty paused for a moment to give importance to what was to come, "I perceive, sir, that your forte is expression." The most wearied cynic must have felt a glow of genuine pleasure as the King said these words, so contagious was the regal, benevolent satisfaction that the exigencies of the occasion had been fitly met.

Otto bowed low before the King, then he turned to salute the Princess; but, as he looked up, his eyes met her marvellous eyes and were fixed by a magic spell, so intense, searching, personal and yet abstracted was the look they met. His entire being was caught up and rapt into hers in an ecstasy of ravishment. Had the gaze lasted another second he must have fainted away.

III.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL.

I DID not go to Herr Veitch until some days after the concert at the palace indeed, I did not care to go. I felt as though I had broken with all continent and decorous life, and was entering upon a delirious course of adventure such as I had read of in some fatal romance of ill-repute, whose course was unnatural and ghastly even in its delights, and whose end

was tragic and disastrous. I was appalled even at the splendour of my dream.

But when I did muster courage to go to the master, I was astonished to find that nothing seemed to have happened at all. Herr Veitch did not even appear to have noticed my absence. He was in a very propitious humour, and complimented me very much on my playing at the palace. "I never knew you,' he said, play with so much certainty and correctness. There is always in your playing a certain originality which might be come, as I have often told you, a great snare, indeed fatal in its results. long, however, as you play as conscientiously as you did the other night, though there will always be a singularity in your style to which some might object, yet you will stand, to my mind, among the great performers on the violin." I had never heard the old man utter such praise before.

So

Nor did I at first notice anything in the manner of the Fraulein towards me, which would show that she was conscious of the necessity for any change. But there soon came a change, which was entirely of my own bringing about. I neglected the master and the violin. I hardened my heart against the Fraulein, and especially avoided the hours when I thought she would be with Herr Veitch. Her wistful eyes had no effect upon me, so foolish and delirious had I become.

One day Herr Veitch said to me, "Yesterday the Fraulein brought us great news. The Princess is betrothed to the Prince von Schongau, who has been staying so long at the palace. He was present, you remember, on the evening of the concert."

I was conscious that my face wore a contemptuous unbelieving sneer. In my madness I thought to myself that I knew much better than to believe such foolish gossip.

At last Herr Veitch took me seriously to task. "Something has happened to you," he said: "you are bewitched, some evil eye has