United States or Haiti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Just a great floating cluster of shining splintered crystals, about a mile long and 300 feet high, with the cold hungry sea leaping and gnawing at its base, that is all. Send up those German musicians here, and let us hear the echo of one of Strauss' Waltzes come ringing back from the chill green caverns.

She finished dressing and went downstairs. It was nearly eight, and Fiorsen had not come in. When the gong was struck, she turned from the window with a sigh, and went in to dinner. That sigh had been relief. She ate her dinner with the two pups beside her, sent them off, and sat down at her piano. She played Chopin studies, waltzes, mazurkas, preludes, a polonaise or two.

The music-teacher was playing vigorously, and so, before the German was arranged, several impetuous souls flew away in waltzes up and down the room. The parlor was a very large room. It had originally been two rooms, but had been thrown into one, as some pillars and a slight arch testified.

But at the very height of his rising ardour he suddenly plunges back into that wild, self-surrendering, heaven and earth- forgetting joyousness a stroke of genius as delightful as it is clever. If we do not understand by the name of scherzo a fixed form, but rather a state of mind, we may say that Chopin's waltzes are his scherzos and not the pieces to which he has given that name. And no wonder!

Can it be true, he wonders, that, after all, Viennese gaiety is an illusion, a base fabrication? Is the Wiener blut, like Iowan blood, calm and sluggish? Is Vienna's reputation bogus, a snare for tourists, a delusion for the unsophisticated? Where is that far-renowned gemüthlichkeit? Has an American press agent had his foul hand in the advertising of Austria's capital? Perhaps perhaps!... But what of those Viennese operas? What of those sensuous waltzes, those lubric bits of schramm-musik which have come from Vienna? And has he not seen pictures of Viennese women angels

He beckoned to the chef d'orchestre, engaged him for a few moments in conversation, poured him out a glass of wine, and slipped something into his hand. Then he recommenced his dinner with a chuckle of satisfaction. "The little man can play," he declared. "He has it in his fingers. We shall hear now the waltzes that I love. Ah, Miss Julia, why is this not Paris!

You seem to think that we can and ought to have a drama like the novels of Meredith, which I believe nobody ever reads, or the pictures of Whistler, that are simply ridiculous, or the ugly music of Strauss I don't mean the one who writes waltzes.

She had enjoyed her waltzes even at that charity-ball at the Pavilion, to which she had gone so unwillingly. The March night was fine, but blustery, when Mrs. Tempest and her daughter started for the Southminster ball.

"There is no need: here is my next partner," she said, as the "beautiful, bountiful Bertie" came up smiling and buoyant. "Anything the matter, sir?" asked Stafford, as he and Falconer made their way round the room through which was floating the last thing in waltzes, a soft and sensuous melody which sang the soul to rest. "I think not. A matter of business, I think," said Ralph Falconer.

The band, with a sort of plethoric indulgence, played slow waltzes in which the bass instruments frequently misapplied notes, but to the allure of which came youthful dancers lovely in proud awkward poses. Mrs. Tuttle meanwhile was the social center, demonstrating that mysterious psychic force known as being the "life of the party."