Wednesdays, and she had merely replied, "Ohne Zweifel, weil er gefunden hat, dass er hier glücklicher ist, als irgendwo anders."
After Paul had tested the piano, he turned to Mr. Silva, who was standing in the doorway fingering his cap and beaming with a sort of wistful pleasure. "Ah," said the old man, "music is the universal language. If every one had an aunt like yours to teach them, there would be no more wars. The nations would take the yoke of Beethoven and Bach upon them and learn of them. When you grow up you will write noble music too, and people of all countries will play it, spreading love and truth throughout the world."
From Mr. Silva's speech Paul drew two overwhelming deductions. First, people wrote music! He had assumed that all music, the world's fixed répertoire, was comprised in the volumes and sheets which were kept in a trunk upstairs and brought forth one at a time, to be mastered in succession—a series which had commenced when he was five years old with "The Merry Peasant" and which was to culminate in a certain redoubtable Liszt Sonata for the satisfactory performance of which, when he had grown up to its measure, Aunt Verona was pledged to hand over to him the watch which the Queen of Holland had given his father for rescuing nineteen Dutch sailors from a burning ship. It had never occurred to him that Beethoven and Bach had once been boys, then grown up and made music out of their heads.
The second deduction was that German and Dutch and Spanish and perhaps even Chinese boys liked music too—the very pieces Canadian boys liked! He had, without stopping to think about it, assumed that music was English, like spelling and geography. He had always realized that one would have to talk German to a German boy, and one wouldn't have anything to say to a Chinese boy—except "Muckahighlo," which Mr. Silva
