FROM 1914 to 1924 I traveled continuously throughout the United States, selling engineering materials.

Dickens and Thackeray took me through my first year. Something had to. For I soon found that I had within me a capacity for acute loneliness which I had never dreamed of a loneliness which swept over me in angry waves and threatened to drown me utterly. Superficial diversions left this melancholy strain untouched. Perhaps I took to reading because the characters in Dickens's and Thackeray's books had become so familiar that I looked upon them as friends, and, as friends, turned to them in my trouble. But read I did, endlessly. Now reading involves a distinct technique when one is thousands of miles from one's own hearthside. One cannot enjoy a book in a hotel bedroom. The four unfamiliar walls press in upon one's consciousness and destroy all illusion. To get the full flavor of an author, to come wholly within the comforting influence of his characters, one should be among people. I liked the mezzanine floor of my hotel or a parlor car, where, figuratively speaking, I could rub elbows with others. I found that those about me gave vitality to my book people.

Whenever it was possible to arrange my schedule so that an evening could be spent in a parlor car, I did so. I made rather a ritual of it, and took great care to adjust my window curtain so that I might look out upon the

darkening countryside. One's imagination so easily becomes occupied with the cozy farmhouse lamps gleaming through the night! It is an excellent prelude to reading. "There,' I would say, ‘is that beautiful symbol of family life, a wellshaded lamp. It is only a hundred yards away as I pass it. Grouped about it are happy and congenial people doing just what I am doing settling down to read after a hard day. All about them is the quieting comfort of familiar things. There is a dozing cat by the fireside, stretching with the exquisite languor of some Persian beauty. Peace has descended upon that household, peace and the plethoric ticking of some portly clock, warm in its place upon the mantelpiece. Can I be lonely with that fireside — even for a fleeting second near me?'

With considerable ceremony I would pick up my book. Now I do not use bookmarks; they are for precise people who read a book as they would build a brick wall, layer on layer. It delights me to find my place leisurely. Salient phrases catch my eye as, like a child in a guessing game, I find myself growing 'warmer and warmer.' I do not hesitate to reread the last few pages and get fully into the spirit of the story before going on. One cannot waste time on a train. If a passage pleases, it is read again, with no counting of minutes. Time stands still while the earth rushes by. Comfortably seated in a parlor car, I once finished Vanity Fair and,

I had spent some two years on the road, when I realized that something must be done about Saturdays and Sundays. You who have never spent forty-four of the fifty-two Sundays in a year away from home cannot imagine their bleak and awful isolation. I could not bring rational analysis to the problem; the situation held a poignancy which clouded clear reasoning. If this seems overdrawn, I shall ask a question. What thoughts come to one on a rainy Sunday spent looking at the four walls of a dingy hotel bedroom, with the warmth and beauty of home a thousand miles away? Let me answer it: horrid, creeping little thoughts! 'Life is passing. Each minute dragging so wearily away might have held a precious experience if you had been home. You are getting older day by day

and

filling your granaries with sawdust. Age has but its memories. What beauty, what warmth, might you have stored in your mind this day if you had been with your friends? At this very moment they are dropping into your home for a cup of tea, their fine familiar faces reflecting the light of candles on the gleaming sideboard. They are talking - brilliant little scraps of conversation, brave mots that one remembers and chuckles over, suddenly, years later. And you're missing it, missing it all. A day that might have been glorious, and is really but twenty-four hours subtracted from your tiny span of life, with not a thought worth recording, not a memory worth holding, not a picture worth recalling, given you in return!' Traveling men may not as a group radiate profound orthodox religious convictions, but they all believe in Hell, for they live in it over each week-end.

I found my salvation quite accidentally. One Saturday afternoon as I searched the mezzanine floor of my

came conscious of the fact that I did not care whether I found one or not. I did not 'feel fer readin',' as the Pennsylvania Dutch say. But what else was there for me to do? A morning of walking in the rain effectually dampened any idea of going out. Abruptly something caught my attention. It was the inviting keyboard of a handsome grand piano, and with a wave of relief I realized that there was something in the world, after all, that I wanted to do. I wanted to play. As a child I had spent many hours at the piano, and, clutching at this slight musical background, I sat down and awkwardly traced out an old melody on the keys. To my surprise, a man who had been sitting near by, hooded in black despair, came over to the instrument and asked me to play something else. I realized, of course, that his action was a desperate fling at an overpowering boredom, but nevertheless I was just a little pleased that I had been able to bring even a spark of interest to his eye. So I played through a forlorn little repertoire of hazily recollected tunes, and it was as though a soothing hand had been laid upon my restless spirit.

We talked, this lone gentleman and I, for an hour and a half, and during this conversation he mentioned the fact that a certain local Episcopal church had rather a fine choir. Did I not wish to hear it? I acquiesced eagerly, for I must confess a very soft spot in my heart for choirs. I sang in a boys' choir for many years as a child, and there is a glamour, a mellow glow, over those years which has persisted ever since. Anyone who has ever sung in a boys' choir will carry the memories with him all his life: the dressing before the service, the quieting hand of the rector as he intones the opening sentence, the soft little sung 'Amen,' the queer noises which leak out of the back of an organ,

the breathless hush just before the first words of the opening hymn, the triumphal music of the processional. As we talked, it all came back to me, and I grieved in my heart for the music I had lost during the intervening years.

The next morning I was in church. Memories I had thought dead fifteen years awoke, and my soul was lifted into verdant places. The beauty of it all! After the service, carried by an enthusiastic impulse, I went forward and spoke to the organist, if for nothing else than to let him know how his music had exalted and quickened an otherwise unendurable morning. With quiet pride in the vast organ, he showed me its key desk, and as I looked at it the church had cleared by now-he said, 'Why don't you play something?' Fingers trembling with excitement, I sat down and found in the rolling profundity of the organ as it responded to my faltering touch a sense of power that was almost incredible. To press that little key, with its featherlike resistance, and hear the beat of oceans, the voices of wind-swept forests, come forth and sweep through the chancel and nave of the church - it was like being temporarily in charge of the universe.

II

I took the church programme with me when I left, and the next day I purchased one or two of the anthems listed thereon. As I clumsily picked them out on the piano I found a great curiosity creeping over me as to the extent of church music. How much was there of it? Who wrote it? Whence came its nobility, its alternate tranquillity and fire? Here were things that were worth finding out. A study of the church hymnal gave me a very faint picture of the army of musicians who have carried the torch of genius through the ages, and I determined to know

more of them. I had found my hobby at last, and in my jubilation cast about for some way to pursue it more closely. Traveling as I did, it would be impossible for me to follow any conventional study of ancient, mediæval, and modern church music, yet I felt that at least I might attempt some rude classification of the music I heard from Sunday to Sunday. So I started a scrapbook, and into it I pasted the programmes or orders of service from the various churches I attended, together with my written impression of each composition used. As new composers appeared in my book I would boldly and freely walk up to the organist of the church I happened to be in and ask him about them. To a man, the organists I spoke to were gracious, patient, and kindly. As my work took me over the country twice a year, I was soon talking to them a second time, then a third, a fourth, a tenth time. Some of them, as the years passed, became firm friends. Cities where Sunday had been a nightmare became cities where Sunday was a day to be looked forward to all during the week. Scarcely a week went by that I was not given an opportunity to play a church organ after service. All during this time, as I encountered interesting new anthems, I would buy them, seek out a secluded piano, and study them. I read music very slowly and, curiously enough, never improved in this respect; but, once read and learned, I never had need of the music again. When I say that it took me two hours and still does! to read the average eight-page anthem, one may see how admirably suited the practice was to filling in dull evenings and rainy Saturday afternoons. My reward was to play it on an organ the following Sunday.

As the scrapbook grew and my hobby assumed larger and larger proportions, there came an interest in the structure of the organ itself, its vast and intricate

mechanism. We are rather given to the use of superlatives in this country, but in the case of the American organ they are deservedly applied. The American organ is one of the great achievements of modern times. Its scientific design, its instantaneous action, its unfailing response, place it technically years ahead of its rivals overseas. But tone is another matter! The loving craftsmanship lavished on old-world instruments cannot be captured, studied, and laid out on a designer's drawing board. It is a creation of the spirit not to be gauged by the slide rule or reduced to the notebook by logarithms. Let us then, while saluting the American geniuses who have made our organ key desks as simple, clean-cut, and efficient as an automobile dashboard, turn and bow our heads before the master craftsmen who have succeeded in giving voice to all that is noble in life.

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During a business trip to London some few years ago, Sir Frederick Bridge, organist for so many years at Westminster Abbey, summed this up for me in rather a humorous way. I had been given a letter to him from a mutual friend, — an English organist in New York, and Sir Frederick was up in the organ loft, playing, as I strolled into Westminster to present it. After climbing some dark stairs, I found myself beside the strangest key desk I had ever seen: wires, 'trackers,' radiated from it in every direction, and I was in mortal terror of catching my toe and breaking something. The distinguished organist read the letter I tendered him, and, fixing me with his pleasant eyes, ordered me to sit down beside him and tell him all about American organs. He asked a great many questions about the electric action used so universally in our instruments; then, falling silent, he raised his musician's hand in a gesture that included the great pipes rising before us, the wires, the keyboard.

'My boy,' he said finally, 'you may trip on it, but it will be sixty years before you can match its tone!' As though to prove what he had said he turned and played 'Adeste, Fideles,' full organ, and I knew at last why the noblest of all hymns had been written. Simply destiny- that it might some day be played upon the Westminster Abbey organ.

III

It has been said that the diapason is the foundation of the organ. If this is true, and I sincerely believe it is, there is an organ in the Netherlands which ought to be included in every music-lover's itinerary. I have never seen it referred to and have often wondered why. A few days after my delightful interview with Sir Frederick Bridge, I was walking through the streets of Rotterdam, and, business concluded, was shaping my course toward the lofty nave of a cathedral I had seen during the morning. It proved to be the old Groote Kerk, with its fantastically whitewashed walls, its queerly refinished woodwork, and other heritages of a misguided militant Protestantism. As luck would have it, for I was leaving for Paris in an hour, -the organist entered shortly after I did, and I was soon listening to such music as I had little dreamed of hearing that day. In my poor little opinion, there are no other diapasons in the world to compare with those in the Groote Kerk organ. Their golden fullness, their bountiful roundness and warmth of tone, are epic. One feels in them all the strength, vitality, all the ruggedness of the Dutch people — their infinite artistic integrity. The thought struck me, as I sat there listening to a Bach fugue, that organs, like architecture, express nationality. Canterbury, Southwark, Westminsterone knows one is in England, for the

organs express solidity, balance, forthrightness. Notre Dame, St.-Sulpice, Sacré-Cœur! These organs are as essentially French as the French tongue to our ears somewhat nasal, almost a bit strident. And our own organs, St. Thomas's, St. John's, and hosts of others, there is an astonishing number of splendid organs in this country,

blending everything, mechanically faultless, striving toward a composite perfection, are they not American?

Having mentioned some French organs, I cannot refrain from telling a humorous little episode that occurred in Paris. One bright May morning I set out from my hotel, resolved to hear as many fine organs as possible. I prefer to study them leisurely, of course, when I can, but this time my stay in Paris included only one Sunday and I wanted to make the most of it. Hailing a taxi, I was soon set down at the Madeleine. An incredible mass of people filled the building, and what with the incense, the heat, the many and various worshipers, I found the atmosphere rather overpowering, and left after the first chant. At the curb, I found the same cab I had used in coming to the church and, stepping into it, I directed the driver to take me to St.-Sulpice. I remained in this church about fifteen minutes, and as I came out I noticed my original taxicab, again unoccupied. With a grin I asked to be taken to Notre Dame. It seemed to me that the chauffeur looked at me strangely; certainly the shrug of his shoulders conveyed more than just an acknowledgment of my request. At Notre Dame I found a gorgeous service in progress. Some sort of military festival it was, with a battle flag at the head of each pew, at least three hundred white-robed singers in the choir, and perhaps a hundred and fifty prelates and church dignitaries in the chancel. The music was glorious, and, fascinated by the warmth

and color of it all, I stayed until the very end. Firmly astride of my hobby by this time, I decided to take in one more church before dinner. (Typically American, I know, but you must remember I get to Paris only once a year.) Naturally I had forgotten all about my cab driver, but lo! he was waiting, unengaged, as I reached the sidewalk. 'Sacré-Cœur,' I said bravely. He paused a moment before opening the cab door, and a smile of deep commiseration, a look of understanding sympathy, flashed over his face like the flicker of a curtain. 'Ah, monsieur,' he said softly, 'quelle pénitence!' Perhaps this hobby

organ music - has been a penance, in the sense that penances are supposed to induce peace. Certainly it has carried me far afield. I have learned to know the riverlike sweep of Guilmant, to recognize the insistent beauty of Widor, the vivid efflorescence of Ruebke, and to feel the exaltation of Barnby, Stainer, Buck, and Handel. Names like Franck, Bach, Tschaikowsky, or Boellman on a recital programme bring an electric prickle of anticipation. To me as a layman the study of church music has become an endless pilgrimage. It has its great moments can any experience in life equal the tranquil ecstasy of hearing Noble's 'Souls of the Righteous' sung at dusk in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine? The utter beauty of it caresses and makes whole again the heart torn and racked by separation from all one holds dear in life. "They are at peace,' sings the choir. 'Oh, fairest liberty!' And all things that harass and hurt seem small and meaningless. Is not loneliness a form of bondage? Can this be bondage- this opportunity of hearing the man-interpreted voice of God? No! It is liberty in its highest sense. "They are at peace.' Where there is peace, there can be no loneliness. Oh, fairest liberty!