Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

Sm STERNDALE BENNETT
whole—something to explain, at least partly, the
experiences which I am about to narrate. I shall
try to do this in the simplest manner possible, colour-
ing nothing, and putting in no fancy-spun incident to
make it more interesting.
The first nine years of my life were passed in a
remote country village, to which no news from the
outward world ever seemed to come. My first con-
scious sensations of delight were the joy I felt in sun-
shine, in the scent and colour of certain flowers, in
the sound of running water, which always sent me off
into a sort of waking dream, and in the wind, every
varied tone of which never failed to arrest my atten-
tion. If it were sighing among the leaves, I felt
pleased and happy ; if it were wild and stormy, I
loved to run before it in an exuberant flow of animal
spirits ; if it whistled round the corners of the house,
and moaned at night up in the chimney-top, I
shuddered and shivered, and seemed to see an endless
sweep of desolate moorland, beneath as endless a
sweep of cloud, which grew ever grayer and grayer.
I seemed to myself to be out there, seeking for shelter,
for companionship, knowing all the while that the
search would ever, ever be in vain.
But every other sensation I had in those early
days grew pale and shadowy before what I felt when
my small fingers first drew sounds from the old
grand-square Broadwood pianoforte, on which I got
my first lesson, before I was five years old. I ran