Life as an endless suite of "variations on a given theme." This notion had filtered into the precocious imagination of Paul Minas, boy organist of the Baptist church in Hale's Turning, Nova Scotia, and dyed his mind as he played on and on through a favourite Bach prelude which luckily suited the mood of the "collection" interval. Solo performances rescued him from the chaos of the external world, bringing him into a mysterious intimacy with life itself. For the moment he was the melody. He felt the music as intrinsically as he felt the warmth in his body, yet his relation to it was romantically tinged with a dormant consciousness of the fact that Phœbe Meddar, seated in the pew with her mother and brother, was, perforce, listening.
The metaphor had not presented itself to him in words. His vocabulary, though fuller than that of Walter Dreer and Mark Laval, was a meagre wardrobe for the variety of rôles he was capable of performing. From a magnanimous prince to a starving poet, from Thaddeus of Warsaw to the Lazarillo de Tormes, he became metamorphosed with amazing facility. The notion of life as music had, without the agency of words, stolen into mind as he gave utterance by means of manuals, pedals and
