
performers, indoors or out, where each grasps his instrument, and each relies on
his fellow with confidence, and an unrivalled concord comes of it. That is our
republic: each one to his work; all in union! There 's the motto for us! Then
you have music, harmony, the highest, fullest, finest! Educate your men to form
a band, you shame dexterous trickery and imitation sounds. Then for the
difference of real instruments from clever shams! Oh, ay, one will set your
organ going; that is, one in front, with his couple of panting air-pumpers
behind - his ministers!« Dr. Shrapnel laughed at some undefined mental image,
apparently careless of any laughing companionship. »One will do it for you,
especially if he 's born to do it. Born!« A slap of the knee reported what
seemed to be an immensely contemptuous sentiment. »But free mouths blowing into
brass and wood, ma'am, beat your bellows and your whifflers; your artificial
choruses - crash, crash! your unanimous plebiscitums! Beat them? There 's no
contest: we 're in another world; we 're in the sun's world, - yonder!«
    Miss Denham's opening notes on the despised piano put a curb on the doctor.
She began a Mass of Mozart's, without the usual preliminary rattle of the keys,
as of a crier announcing a performance, straight to her task, for which Rosamund
thanked her, liking that kind of composed simplicity: she thanked her more for
cutting short the doctor's fanatical nonsense. It was perceptible to her that a
species of mad metaphor had been wriggling and tearing its passage through a
thorn-bush in his discourse, with the furious urgency of a sheep in a panic; but
where the ostensible subject ended and the metaphor commenced, and which was
which at the conclusion, she found it difficult to discern - much as the sheep
would be when he had left his fleece behind him. She could now have said, »Silly
old man!«
    Dr. Shrapnel appeared most placable. He was gazing at his Authority in the
heavens, tangled among gold clouds and purple; his head bent acutely on one
side, and his eyes upturned in dim speculation. His great feet planted on their
heels faced him, suggesting the stocks; his arms hung loose. Full many a hero of
the alehouse, anciently amenable to leg-and-foot imprisonment in the grip of the
parish, has presented as respectable an air. His forelock straggled
