Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

SIT? UTERNDALE BENNETT 35
is not in the profession, for the wish is still there.'
As we stood at his door, and he shook hands with us,
his parting words to me (the last I ever heard him
utter) were, ' Though you are not a public player, yet
remember that I tell you you have not for all that
missed your vocation.'
Time went on, and, with many an ebb and How, I
alternately grasped and let go the piano. At last
some hindrances passed out of the way, and it seemed
possible to recommence my studies with Sir Sterndale
Bennett. I took to working regularly every day in
January, 187— , and in the first week of February, in
the postscript of a letter from a London friend, I was
scared by the words, ' The papers this morning say,
" Sir Sterndale Bennett is in a state of great exhaus-
tion." ' But I would not believe that it was anything
but an idle report, and I think it must have been the
same day that I went to the house of a friend, and
began to play Mozart's Sonata in F Major (one of
Sterndale Bennett's favourite pieces, and one of those
which I had been intending to play to him, perhaps in
a month or two later on). But this was never to be,
for at the close of the first movement a gentleman
who had just come in, and who, only knowing that I
had once been a pupil of Sir Sterndale Bennett, had
no idea that the news would affect me particularly,
observed, ' You know, of course, that your old master
is dead.' And as I repeated the last word in a sort of
daze, he continued, in the same tone as we use in
3—2