“So,” said Martin, throwing away the of his third cigar, “you have heard my experience.  May you profit by it!  I am now in the pork-packing business, and make a handsome income for my wife and two children.  To-morrow I go to New York, to bring them into these wilds for change of air.  And now, good night.”

* * * * *

ROBERT AND CLARA SCHUMANN.

FLORESTAN’S STORY.

I.

In every person’s memory there are niches fixed, and in those niches are sacred persons.  These are such as never obtruded themselves upon you, staining the pane through which their light shone with their own images, but who became perfectly transparent to the word they uttered, the song they sang, or the work they did.  Such a sacred person to me is the gifted woman who first interpreted for me Schumann’s Albums.  Many years ago it was, as she told me, that she one day stood unperceived in the half-open door of her master, near the lesson-hour, and heard him softly rendering a theme which stole far into places of her heart, which had been awaiting its spell unconsciously.  Presently he felt that there was a listener, and, hastily brushing away a tear, he placed the music in a far corner of the room, away from his repertoire.  She confessed, that, afterward, when he was not present, she had looked on that which he evidently desired to conceal; she saw written, in pencil, upon it, “Sternenkranz.”  Thenceforth shops and catalogues were ransacked, but no “Sternenkranz” was found,—­the word was evidently her master’s own fancy; so she summoned all her heroism, one day, when Herr Otto complained of her indifference to the pieces he set before her, and informed him that she should perish at his feet, unless he would give her “Sternenkranz.”  Of course her guilt was manifest, and Herr Otto, in a spasm of anger at “prying women,” as he called them, brought out the treasure, and with it others of a very rare album of Schumann’s, to which he had given no names, leaving them to whisper their own names to each soul that could receive them:  Star-Wreath it might be to one, Bower of Lilies to another.  It was the same as with that white stone which the Seer of Patmos saw,—­within it “a name written which no man knoweth, saving he that receiveth it.”

This piece was to the lady a touch of consecration.  Thenceforth she was known among us as “the Schumannite woman.”  I verily believe that to-day, next to the divine Clara herself, she is the best interpreter of Robert Schumann’s works living; and if the love she has obtained for him is not as universal, it is just as fervent.  Many silent and holy hours have I sat communing, through her, with him whom the Germans love to call their Tone-Poet; and the music remained to clothe with the full vesture of romance the meagre paragraphs of the journals which hinted his love, his sorrow, and at length his insanity and death.  More, however, I longed to know of him,—­of the wedlock of these Brownings of music; and more I came to know, in the way which, with this preface, I now proceed to relate.