wine is sold.

And there is always the same swing of the waltz, ever melodious, never monotonous, the same in the large brilliant cafés of the Prater as in the small, modest wine shops.

Oh Vienna! Town of song and dance, where is thy happiness now?

How these gay, pleasure-loving, genial people, so full of bonhomie and so markedly different from the nasty inhabitants of Berlin, could start this horrible war, is the one thing that must astonish anybody who knows Vienna even a little. I will say here, that one of the reasons why I write this book is precisely that I believe I have an explanation for this riddle, which seems nearly incapable of being solved.

These first days of Vienna appear to my memory as a kind of storm of jubilation, as a tempest of laughter and cries of amusement, of shouting and singing, of the frolicking of light feet, of the sweet weeping of violins.

And only the fact that I was living in a very middling first-class hotel spoiled my pleasure. It meant much money and little comfort. It meant, too, service by the worst waiters in the world. I don't know what London has ever found in the German or more correctly Austrian waiter. Happily the war has cleared him away. And even then a mistake, a prejudice was necessary. For we are not rid of him because he was a rotten waiter, but because the Evening News took this creature, the most brainless in the world, for a ... spy.

At least, after a week, remorse came. Here I was, in Vienna, supposed to learn the gentle art of music, and in reality spending the money of Daniel Cooper and Co., Insurance Brokers, London, E.C., on ... No! I am not going to blush over all the details. Besides, you have sufficient imagination to blush for me.

But while I talk of blushing, I may as well tell you that I was not found worthy of entering the conservatoire. This I regretted only because I had heard of an abundant flora of pretty girls which was to be found there. For every other reason private lessons seemed to me the better way to get acquainted with the mysteries of harmony and counter point.

I enquired and my choice fell soon on a man who, as an organist, was a local celebrity, although he had failed to achieve much success as a composer. His name was Robert Hammer, he was a genius and accordingly poor.

When I went to see him, I was really shocked, so great seemed his distress. His apartment on the top floor of a house in the suburbs was composed of one small room. There was a small iron bed, covered with big parcels of manuscripts, and a baby grand piano, also covered with music paper. There was a plain deal table, a kitchen table in fact, again heaped with papers, and two wooden chairs which excluded all idea of taking one's ease. The walls were hung with an old discoloured paper, and quite unadorned, save by a colour print representing the old Emperor Francis Joseph.

The master—he was nearly seventy—seemed exceedingly shy. He did not appear to be greatly struck with the idea of giving lessons to a Mozart, even to one born in Belsize Park. He absolutely refused to name a figure as a payment for his trouble, and I had to name mine which, from an insurance broker's point of view, was cheap enough, but which evidently was a decisive factor for a starving Viennese musician.

He accepted, and the lessons began.

How can I give you an idea of old Robert Hammer? Imagine a sort of middle height peasant with a flavour of a protestant parson, the head of a Roman Emperor, Claudius, for instance; bald, but so bald, as to make believe that it was an artificial baldness, an exaggerated baldness that extended to the neck and the temples; no beard, no moustaches, no eyebrows. He was always dressed in black; his trousers were shaped like those of a British sailor, the coat ill fitting, too long and too wide, the sleeves reaching the fingertips. His collar was so narrow that it was scarcely visible, and his black tie resembled a shoe lace. As for his boots, I think it must be he who invented the fashion of the dainty things we wear in the trenches. He was always rolling a little snuff between his fingers. When he sat down to improvise on the organ or the piano, that little snuff was dexterously moved from the right to the left and back to the right and again to the left, according as the one or the other hand was in the better position to play with three fingers only. Of course, by degrees all the snuff would be lost and scattered over the keys. Then only old Hammer would do the really impossible thing, namely, juggle away the imaginary remains of the snuff into his nose.

He was at once a genius and a perfect fool, an old man and a baby; he possessed all possible refinement in his art, and was ignorant of any in life; no organist ever reached his perfection; no musician was a worse teacher.

He was a very friendly, kind man as long as his unbelievable absence of mind did not interfere with his kindness. He was one of the many types of Viennese musicians, and I do not think that you could find in the whole world one that would resemble him.

One morning, a fortnight or three weeks after my first lesson, he inquired about the life I was leading. And as I complained regarding the inconveniences of hotel life, he asked me why I should not hire a furnished room.

"I have been warned," I said, "that hotel life was still preferable to insect life."

He did not understand, and I had to explain.

"There are not insects everywhere," he answered. "You must know, of course, where to stay. There is my friend Doblana for instance, who has a very nice flat. His wife died a year ago, and he has now one room too many. Besides, his house would be the right thing for you, and you would enjoy his company. He is a musician who plays the horn in a most charming manner. You see, he is a Czech, and most Czechs have thick, fleshy lips, a peculiarity which enables them to play exceedingly well. The lips are most important when playing the horn. The oldest classics did not know that. This is the reason for their awkward writing. The first who recognized what could be achieved by the horn were Méhul and Beethoven, but Weber had to be born to invent the new perfect language of this wonderful instrument, the most sensual and the most chaste."

Mr. Doblana was forgotten, and his furnished room too. Good old Hammer was raving over the qualities of the horn, over Meyerbeer's cleverness to write for it, and over the various ways modern composers used it, especially Wagner.

But if Hammer had forgotten Doblana, I had not. The possibility of living in a musician's decent house was too tempting, and I decided to call upon him that very afternoon.

A rapid footstep interrupts me. It is Sergeant Young who comes back.

"That's all right, Police Constable," he says (I bet he has forgotten that my real name is Patrick Cooper), "you need not worry about these hand grenades, we'll have them in half a mo. I've blackmailed the colonel in the most shameless way, but I've succeeded."

He takes my MS. and reads the second chapter.

"That will never do," he says after a while. "If you mix up our trench business with your Austrian affairs, how do you hope that the reader will find his way?"

"He will muddle through."

"No publisher will accept it in this form."

"Well, he will have it edited. Editors must live."

The Sergeant sees that there is nothing to be done, and goes on reading.

"You did not say why you left Munich," he remarks at last.

"Oh!" I answer lightly, "because I had a ticket for Vienna."