Flute-music with an Accompaniment

( A solan do , 1889.) “Is not outside seeming real as substance inside?” A man hears a bird-like fluting; he wonders what sweet thoughts find expre ion in such sweet notes. Pa ion must give birth to such expre ion. Love, no doubt! A urance, contentment, sorrow and hope—he detects all these moods in the music, softened and mellowed by the interposing trees. His lady companion brushes away all his fancy-spun notions by telling the prosy fact that the music proceeds from a desk-drudge, who spends the hour of his luncheon with the Youth’s Complete Instructor how to Play the Flute , the plain truth being that his hoarse and husky tootlings have not the remotest relation to the romantic ideas with which her male companion has a ociated them. Distance has altered the sharps to flats; the mi ing bar was not due to “ki ing interruption,” but to a blunder in the playing. The man philosophises on this to the effect that, if fancy does everything for us, it matters little what may be the facts. If appearance produces the effect of reality, seeming is as good as being.