Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

SIR STERNDALE BENNETT 19
A book with a black morocco binding contained the
correspondence between him and Mendelssohn, and
I read the whole so many times over that, even at
this distance of time, I could write much of it down
word for word, but to quote from it would be a
breach of faith. Once, when he had been pleased
with my work, he said, ' I will lend you the album
which I have had since I was a boy, and your sister
can perhaps copy for you a picture which Mendelssohn
painted in it for me before I left Leipzig.' This view
was taken from Sterndale Bennett's window, and
showed the roof of the Conservatoire, on which the
wintry snow was lying. The copy which my sister
made of it was so exact that the next time Sterndale
Bennett came to give me a lesson, he exclaimed as
he came into the room, ' Is that my picture out of
the album ?' This water-colour drawing is to me a
sacred relic
—
his clear, very characteristic handwriting
on the margin tells that the picture is a copy of the
one in his album, who it was painted by, for whom,
and what it represented. But the picture has an
even still deeper interest for me, inasmuch as it
recalls to me ' the touch of a vanished hand ' (the
copyist of the picture)
.
One other way he took of showing kindness, which,
now that I look back, and realize, as I could not in
those days of youth, what an amount of kindly interest
it implied, surprises me and fills me with tender grati-
tude. Knowing that I could read a little from the