It is between the parts. He bends suavely over the back
of a lady's chair and talks sweet music to her ear. He says: "Could you
not follow every thought of the composer in that symphony?" (which they
have just heard). "And was not the effect sublime when the storm reached
the heights of the mountains, and all the elements of Nature struggled
so stubbornly?" And the young woman demurely gives him an assuring look
which conserves all her interests; whereupon he backs off in triumph,
and feels that the concert _is_ worth his week's wages after all!
AGAIN,
this young man at Grand Haven, on the western border of Lake Michigan,
boards the structure of pine wood and ten-penny nails called the Alpena.
The Alpena floats out into her last night--into the valley of the shadow
of death. Presently the young man feels his vessel and his life
trembling like a captive wild bird in a remorseless grasp. Anon this
trembling grows into the awful, final, fatal paroxysms. Then suddenly
the mind of the young man breaks from the shackles of vanity and
self-sufficiency, and he views, for the first time, the visible forms of
angered Nature.
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