ÏO CHAFDOS: crossed the room lightly and swiftly, and laid his hands on the musician's shoulders, with a kind and almost caressing gesture. "Ah, Lulli! you are awake and employed before I have yet been in bed. You shame me here with your flood of sunlight. No! do not rise; do not leave off; go on with the Tantum Ergo while I listen. It is a grand hymn to the day." Lulli looked at him still with that loving, reverent, grateful look of a dog's deathless fidelity. " Monseigneur, the sound of your voice to me is like the sound of water to the thirsty in a desert place," he said, simply, in sweet, soft, Southern French, giving, in earnest veneration to his host and master, the title that Trevenna often gave in jest. Chandos smiled on him—a sunlit, generous smile, gentle as a woman's. " And so is your music to me: so there is no debt on either side. Go on." " My life is one long debt to you. God will pay it to yon: I never can." The words were heartfelt, and his eyes, looking up- ward, still uttered them with still more eloquence. Contrast more forcible than these, as they were now together, could scarcely have been found in the width of the world. The attenuated and enfeebled cripple, with his useless limbs, his bowed shoulders, and his life worn with physical suffering that bound him like a cap- tive and robbed him of all the power and the joy of ex- istence, beside the splendid grace of the man who stood above him. in a strength too perfect for dissipation to ieave the slightest trace of weariness upon it, and with a beauty dazzling as a woman's, fresh from every pleas ure of the sight or sense, and full of all the proudest ambitions, the richest enjoyments, and the most care- less insouciance of a superb manhood and a cloudless fortune. A contrast more startling nor, for one, more bitter could not have been placed side by side. But there was no envy here. The loyal gratitude of Lulli had no jealous taint upon it that could have made him, even for one moment, see anything save gladness and gentleness in the gracious presence of the man to whom he owed more than existence. He could no more have felt envy to his benefactor than he could have taken up a knife and stabbed him. Six years before, travelling through southern Spain, an accident to his carriage had detained Chandos at a wayside inn in the very heart of the Vega. Whiling away the tedium of such detention by sketching an old Moorish bridge that spanned a torrent, high in air, he heard some music that fixed his attention—the music of a violin played with an exquisite pathos. He in- quired for the musician. A handsome gitana, with a basket of melons on her head, gladly answered his inquiries. The violinist was a youth dying, as she thought, in a chalet near. He was alone, very poor, and a stranger. The words were sufficient to arrest Chandos: he sought out the chalet and found the mu- sician, lying on a straw pallet, and dying, as tho girl had said, rather from hunger than any other illness, but with his large burning eyes fixeu on the sun that was setting beyond the screen of tangled vine-leaves early careless whisper, soft, idle, and painless, of love in its first moments—love that is but a mere moment- ary, passionate impulse, and may never ripen to more. The lull of early morning, the measure of the music passing onward witlrout pause into the masses of Mo- zart and Mendelssohn, fell gently and mellowly on him after the crowded hours of the past night and day. As the chords thrilled through the silence of the breaking day, joining the clear notes of the awakening birds be- neath amidst the leaves, his thoughts wandered away, dreamy and disconnected, ranging over the cloudless years of a successful life, in which all the memories were painted as with an Elizabethan pencil, without shadow. In them he had never known one gray touch of disappointment, far less still one dark taint of calamity; in them woman's lips had never betrayed him, nor man's hand been raised against him. For- tune had favored and the world had loved him. No regret lay on him, and no unfulfilled desire left its trail. There was nothing in his career he wished the fidelity and gratitude that were rivalled in him by his art alone. " I should be little worthy all I owe to you, if I could find one want unsatisfied." "Owe! You owe me nothing. Whowould giveim> such music as you can give? It is not every one who is= fortunate enough to have a Mozart in his house. X wish I could serve you better in the search that is nearest your heart. We have done all we could, Guido," His voice was very gsntle, and had a certain hesita- tion. He appoaehed a subject that had a bitterness both of grief and of shame to his listener; and Chandos, carelessly disdainful of a prince's wishes, was careful of the slightest jar that could wound the sensitiveness of the man who was dependent on him. Lulli's head sank, and a dark shadow passed over his face—a flush of shame and of anger, as heavy and as passionate as could arise in a temperament so visionary and tender to feminine softness, mingled, too. undone; there were no memories in it that it would with a sorrow far deeper than wrath can reach, have been pain to open ; there were no pages of it that were not bright with soft, rich, living color. He had passed through life having escaped singularly all the shadows that lie on it for most men: and he had, far more than most, what may be termed the faculty for happiness, a gift, in any temperament, whose wisdom and whose beauty the world too little recognizes. His thoughts, floating on with the melodious chords that swelled in wave on wave of sound through the quiet of the morning, drifted back by some unfollowed chain of association to the remembrance of the hot autumn sunset at Clarencieux, when, as a child, he had dreamt his chivalric fancies over the story of Arthur, and had told his father what his future should be. " Have I kept my word?" he mused, as he leaned his arms on the embrasure of the window, while the early light fell on the gold and the jewels of his Plantagenet masquerade dress. The lofty, idealic, impossible dreams, so glorious in their impracticability, so fair in their sublime folly, in which boyhood had aspired to a soilless fame and an heroic sovereignty such as this earth has never seen and never can see, recurred to him with something that was almost, for the moment, a passing sadness—the same sadness which, in the words of Jean Paul, lies in music, " because it speaks to us of things that in all our life we find not, and never shall find." "Have I kept my word?" he thought. "I rule the world of pleasure; but I meant then a wider world than that. They follow me because I lead the fashion; be- cause I amuse them better than any other; because they gain some distinction by cutting their coats and wearing their wrist-bands like mine ; but that is not the fame either he or I meant in those years. They talk of me; they imitate me; they obey me; they quote me; they adore my works, and they court my approbation. But am I very much more, after all, than a mere idler?" The genius latent in him, which in his present life only found careless expression in glittering bagatelles and poems, half Lucrefian, half Catullan, stirred in him now with that restlessness for higher goals, that that hung over the hut-door, and his hands still draw- I refusal to be satisfied with actual and present"achie've- ing from the chords, m wild and mournful strains, the ' ™<>"<- -.-r,r»r. ~t,„..„,.f.,..;---------<.,~ t- ..n <*.. s........ ., . -nusic for which life alone lingered in him. He was a mere lad of twenty years, and was a cripple. Chandos only saw to vescue them. Food, hope, and the sound of a voice that spoke gently and pityingly to him, fused fresh existence into the dying boy: he lived, and his Ufe from that moment was sheltered by the man who had found him perishing on the Spanish hills., Ghido Lulli had lived in Chandos' household, now in town, now at Clarencieux, never treated as a depen- dant, but surrounded by all that could alleviate or make him forget his calamity, out of the world by his own choice as utterly as though hewereina monastery, spending his days and nights over his organ and his music-score, and never having harder task than to organize the music of those concerts and operas in the private theatre at Clarencieux for which his patron's entertainments were noted. Guido Lulli's was far from the only life that Chandos, the pleasure-seeker and the voluptuary, had redeemed, defended and saved. Obedient to his wish, the melody of the Catholic chant rolled through the stillness orthe earlymorning, succeeding strangely to the wit, the laughter, the revelry, and the hazard of a few moments previous. It was precisely such a succession of contrasts of which his life was made up, and which gave it its vivid and unfading color: closely interwoven, and never trenching one upon another, the meditative charm of art and of thought succeeded with him to the pleasures of the world. He would pass from all the intoxication and indulgence of an Alcibiades to all tlie thoughtful soli- tude of an Augustine ; and it was this change, so com- plete and so perpetually variable, which, while it was produced by the mutability of his temperament, made In a large degree the utter absence iii his life of all knowledge of satiety, all touch of weariness. He listened now, leaning his arm on the sill of the open window that looked out upon the gardens below fresh, even in town, with the breath of the spring on their limes and acacias, and the waking song ofthe nest-birci''. greeting the day. The rolling notes of the organ pe;Ued out in all their solemnity, the cathedral rhythm svr filing out upon the silence of the dawn, that had been heard by him so often in the splendor of St. Petals.at Easter-time, in the hush of Notre Dame at midiirgl!W*aass, and in the stillness of Benedictine and Cistercian cÇapels in the chestnut woods of Tuscany and the lonefy mountain-sides of hill-locked Australian lakes. A thobsand memories of foreign air were in the deep-dra\n and melodious chords; a thousand echoes of the dead glories of mediœval Rome rose with the Tantum eigo Sacramentum Venerernur cernui. A helpless and fragile cripple in the world, no stronger than a reed, and ignorant oi all things save his art, once before his organ, once in the moment of his inspi- ration, Guido Lulli had the grandeur of a master, the force and the omnipotence of a king. In his realm he reigned supreme, and Chandos not seldom left his titled associates and his careless pleasures to come and listen to these melodies in his protege's still, monas- tical chamber, as he heard jhem now. He leaned against the embrasure, looking out into the tangled mass of leaves beneath, and letting his thoughts float dreamily down the stream of sound, blent with the lustre of the smiling eyes and the gleam of the imperial beauty that had newly csught his mem- ory and his fancy. Entangled with the imaginations of his own Byatntine poem, she haunted him with that ment, which characterize genius in all its forms—that unceasing and irrepressible "striving towards the light" which pursued Goethe throughout life and was upon his lips in death. Dissatisfaction in no shape ever touched Chandos; his years were too cloudless, and too full of fairest flavor, for discontent ever to be known in them. Itwas but rarely, now and then, when in the pauses of his pleasures and his fame, the remembrance of his childhood's grand, visionary, impalpable ambi- tions came back to him, that the thought swept across him of having insufficiently realized them, of having been in some sort untrue to them, of losing in a dazzling celebrity the loftier purity of those early and impossible dreams. It was not wholly true, nor wholly just towards him- self. Egotism had little place in his life ; full though it was of a Greek-like softness and Greek-like idolatry of beauty and of pleasure, of an Epicureanism that shunned all pain and abhorred all roughness and all harshness, the cahftnities of others were widely suc- cored by him, and the bead-roll was long of those who owed him the most generous gifts that man can owe to man. He enjoyed, but he never forgot that others suffered. He loved the ease, the beauty, and the serenity of existence: but he also did his uttermost that others should know them too. "1 enjoy," he thought now, as he leaned out into the morning sunshine. " It is the supreme wisdom of life, and the best gift of the gods is to know it ! The Greeks were right, and in this age men remember it too little Old Guy Patin was a million times wiser than all the Frondeurs, sitting under the summer-shade of his Cormeille cherry-trees with Lucretius and Lucilius and Antoninus, while his friends killed each other with fret and fume. Bonaparte said, ' I have conquered Cairo, Milan, and Paris in less than two years, and yet if I died to-morrow I should only get half a page in any biographical dictionary;' but to geta line, orevenonly to get an obituary notice and oblivion, men toil a life away and consume their years in thankless, grinding, ceaseless labor. The benighted opticism of vanity! The succession of the nations is but as a torch-race.' What is it to feed the flame of one of the torches for a passing second—a spark that flares and dies? The Greek ideal of Dionysus, with the ivy on his brow and the thyrsus in his hand, bringing joy wherever he moved, while the wine flowed and nature bloomed wherever the god's foot fell, is the ideal of the really happy hfe, the life that knows howto enjoy." The thoughts drifted through his mind lightly dreamily, as the swell of the organ-notes poured on. It *2fLtr??' h? eIWed. and his temper, like the temper of the Greeks, asked only this of life. Chandos was not only famous, not only gifted, not only steeped to the lips in delicate and sensuous de- light; he was much more than all these: he was happy. How many lives can saythat? The music paused suddenly, dropping down in its gorgeous festival of sound as a lark suddenly drops to the grass in the midst of its flood of song. Chandos turned as it ceased, and broke his idle thread of musing shoulder he laid his hand gently on the musician'! "Dear Lulli, while one hears your music, one is in Avilhon You make me dream of the old serene and sacred n«para y