Author: Henry Blake Fuller

Publisher: Rarebooksclub.com

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 46

ISBN-13: 9781230042619

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 edition. Excerpt: ...He trudged on in the treadmill of a fugue with a lightfooted alacrity, and could follow a subject in double counterpoint from the score with absolute avidity. A lady had once told him that the playing of his quartette was tiresome. To whom? he had asked. To her, she had replied. And then he had quieted her by telling her that chamber-music was meant to interest not the listeners but the performers. As for the Governor, his delight was wholly in his own work. He played quite indifierently, but he took more pleasure in the uncertain pipings of his own flute than any sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies in which he had no share could ever have given him. I doubt if even the very harmony of the spheres would have seemed quite to his taste, unless resulting in part from the puckering of his own lips, But it was idle to stand disputatiously on the panoramic height of the Capuzinerberg in expectation that some chance breeze from below might waft them up a page of manuscript; so during the course' of the day the Governor repaired to a certain small shop in an obscure part of the town where, as a friend had advised him, he might be able to meet his requirements. It was in a street close to the base of the Monchsberg, against whose steep rise the houses were attached, and in whose side they were partly excavated. The place was in charge of a substantial matron, who drew her hand across her mouth with a kind of anticipatory relish, and who jostled aside a collection of dusty and dented curios to make space for the spreading out of her musical merchandise. She had something to show, and she knew it; she opened up in a way that more than redeemed the promise of the place, and that made the Governor's wish seem not so very...