of corn or its equivalent to fatten a steer. I sold my cattle at $6.85, and they averaged 1,325 pounds. They cost $40; feed (75 bushels at 60 cents), $45; shipping and selling, $3.50; total, $88.50. Sale of 1,325 pounds at $6.85, $90.70. Profit to feeder, $2.70." This simply goes to show that there is a close struggle with dollars and cents before the cattleman reaps his profits and takes a trip to Europe.

Other feeders better situated, perhaps, for securing "roughness," as hay and straw are called, or who could use wheatfields for pasture during the winter, fed cattle and made a fair return. One man shipped corn from Iowa and alfalfa from Colorado to fatten cattle in central Kansas, and his account showed a small profit. In general, it was not a feeding year, and the ranchmen either sacrificed their surplus stock or sent them to the further ranges of the Northwest or the buffalograss of the Southwest to wait better conditions. If the packers controlled the market to an extent that enabled them to dictate prices, it was made possible by these conditions, but those familiar with the situation know that there was good reason for high beef outside this alleged combination.

Another very present problem before the cattleman of the West to-day is the use of the Government range. Impelled by the demands of settlers and small ranchers, as well as by the importunities of the sheepmen, who also covet the green acres, the Government has ordered that all fences be removed from the public domain. When cattlemen are dilatory in the matter, the marshals proceed to use clippers on the barbed strands. To the settler it seems that this order is just, but the cattleman objects on these grounds: He says that if all the cattle are to run loose on the plain, as in the old days, the use of thoroughbred stock will be impossible, and herds will deteriorate; that the land is by no means fit for farming, take one year with another, and it would be a blessing to keep the settler out. The ranchers want Congress to appoint a commission to determine what lands shall thus be used and not opened to homestead.

In the meantime, the ranchman, nis herders, his nephews, and his friends are filing homestead claims on every 160 acres possible that lie along the streams, in preparation for the future.

On the range the cattlemen are hoping for drought-a condition rare in this

country. As one expressed it: "If we can get a dry year, these settlers will go back East where they can depend on things; if it rains, they will raise a little, and hang on for nobody knows how long. They'll go in the end, of course, so let 'em go now." But the settlers say they will not go" in the end," and they certainly are building as though they mean it.

The cattle business of the future will continue, as now, to be managed on strictly business principles. It will, however, be eventually on a more stable basis, as the questions of the use of the range and the competition of settlement will be ended. That the range will be restricted is certain; that there will be a readjustment of the business on some of its lines is probable. The present high prices for beef will doubtless induce a rapid growth of the industry; thousands will go into stock-raising, and hope for large returns. Unlike sheep, the herds of cattle cannot be rapidly increased. It takes several years to make material changes in the numbers, and, with the steadily growing population of this Nation, and the increased

demand for meats, there is little likelihood of any immediate overplus of the ranch's product.

Most of us can remember when the town dealer went from farm to farm, picking up a single animal here and another there until he secured a load, then shipping it to the city. The West has not yet known that period, but some day it will. The tendency toward diversified agriculture and the mingling of stockraising with grain production is marked, and in the end it will prevail generally. Under that system there will be more cattle and better cattle than to-day.

The day of the great cattle syndicate. and the immense ranches will pass away, and with them many of the picturesque features that have furnished so many pages to the romancer. The cattle trail has already become history, and every year is making of ranch life a soberer and more businesslike proceeding. Its readjustment to present-day conditions furnishes an interesting study, and its future development as one of the Nation's greatest industries will be worth watching.

I

T is a principle of musical expression that of the two great types of temperament, the active and the contemplative, the first tends to express itself in strongly rhythmic figures, the second in phrases of vaguer outline, full of sentiment not easily to be confined in molds. The man of action is incisive, vigorous, compact in utterance; the mystic is by contrast indefinite and discursive. It has been well established, indeed, that primeval music was the product of two modes of instinctive emotional expression, the gesticulatory and the vocal, dance and song; and throughout its growth these two strands, however closely they may intertwine, can still be traced. Thus it happens that even to-day we find the complex work of modern musicians getting a special impress of personality and style according as the rhythmic or the melodic-harmonic faculty predominates in the individual. One man's music will be notable for its strong pulse, its variety and vivacity of rhythm; another's will appeal to the more dreamy and sentimental part of our natures, will speak to our hearts so movingly that we shall recognize its descent from the song rather than from the dance. And in all such cases the first man will be of the active temperament, a man of the world, of many interests and great nervous force; the second will be contemplative, inclined to the monastic life, and of great heart rather than keen intelligence.

Such an antithesis of artistic product and of personal character exists in a peculiar degree between Camille SaintSaëns and César Franck, the two greatest composers France has produced since Bizet. Each of these men is great by virtue of qualities somewhat wanting in the other. The one is clever, worldly, learned and a little superficial; the other, profound, religious, of singularly pure and exalted spirit, is yet emotional to the verge of abnormality. And so

with their music: that of Saint-Saëns is

energetic, lucid, consummately wrought, while Franck's, more moving and more subtle, is so surcharged with feeling as to become vague and inarticulate. A review of their lives and a brief analysis of their work will bring out more clearly this divergence of nature, which, in spite of the many traits they have in common, has constrained them to very different careers and exacted of them very dissimilar artistic services.

I.—SAINT-SAËNS

At a concert given in Paris in 1846 appeared a new prodigy, a boy pianist, "le petit Saint-Saëns," as the "Gazette Musicale" announced him, who, only ten and a half years old, played Händel, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, "without notes, with no effort, giving his phrases with clearness, elegance, and even expression in the midst of the powerful effects of a numerous orchestra using all its resources." This, the first public appearance of SaintSaëns, was by no means his first musical exploit. We read that he began the study. of the piano with his great-aunt at the age of three, when already his sense of tone was so keen that he would press down with his left hand the slender fingers of the right until they became strong enough to satisfy his exacting requirements; that at five he composed little waltzes; that at ten he played fugues by Bach, a concerto of Hummel, and Beethoven's C-minor Concerto; and that he could tell the notes of all the clock-chimes in the house, and once remarked that a person in the next room was "walking in trochees." By the time he was seventeen he had earned wide reputation as a pianist, had taken prizes. for organ-playing at the Conservatory, and had written an ode for chorus, solo, and orchestra, and a symphony. Thus early did he lay the foundations of that skill which in the early seventies, when at Wagner's house he played on the piano the "Siegfried" score, won from Von Bülow the remark that, with the exception

of Wagner and Liszt, he was the greatest musician living.

The surprising energy and versatility shown at the opening of Saint-Saëns's career have proved, in the course of time, to be the salient traits of his typically Gallic nature. He is, to a remarkable degree, the complete Frenchman. He has all the intellectual vivacity, all the nervous force, the quick wit and worldly polish, even the physical swarthiness and the dry keenness of visage, that we associate with his countrymen. M. Georges Servières, in his "La Musique Française Moderne," gives the following excellent description: "Saint-Saëns is of short stature. His head is extremely original, the features characteristic; a great brow, wide and open, where, between the eyebrows, the energy and the tenacity of the man reveal themselves; hair habitually cut short, and brownish beard turning gray; a nose like an eagle's beak, underlined by two deeply marked wrinkles starting from the nostrils, eyes a little prominent, very mobile, very expressive. The familiars of his Mondays, those who knew the artist before injured health and family sorrows had darkened his character, remember that there was about him then a keen animation, a diabolic mischievousness, a railing irony, and an agility in leaping in talk from one subject to another with a spright liness of fancy that equaled the mobility of his features, which were animated at one and the same moment by the most contrary expressions; and I could cite as instances of his gay humor many funny anecdotes that he loved to tell, adjust ing on his nose the while, with both hands, in a way peculiar to him, his eyeglasses, behind which his eyes sparkled with malice."

Some examples of this railing irony of Saint-Saëns are preserved. There is, for instance, a story of an ambitious woman at one of his " one of his "Mondays," who fairly browbeat him into accompanying her two daughters in a duet. After enduring as long as he could the torture of their timeless and tuneless performance, he turned to the mother with," Which of your daughters, madam, do you wish me to accompany?" A man of his wit naturally found himself at home in Paris society, and counted among his friends for years such people as the Princess Paul

A

ine Metternich, Mme. Viardot-Garcia, and Meissonier, Tourgenieff, and Dumas. story told in the "Figaro," of how at Ma dame Garcia's, where he often played both the organ and the piano, he would pass from improvising "masterly pages" in the contrapuntal style to waltzes for the young people to dance by, illustrates in little that peculiar combination of distinction and gayety, characteristic of Paris, which is the native air of Saint-Saëns.

But this adept metropolitan is also an inveterate nomad. Not content with traveling all over Europe in his virtuoso. tours, he has long had the habit of wintering in outlandish places like the Canary Islands. Often he leaves home without announcing to any one his departure, or even giving friends his address; sometimes without knowing himself where he will go. The spectacle of distant lands and alien races has for him an inexhaustible fascination. In writing of h's experiences in England, where he went in 1893 to receive the doctor's degree from Cambridge, he dwells with gusto on the procession of dignitaries, at the head of which, he says, "marched the King of Bahonagar, in a gold turban sparkling with fabulous gems, a necklace of diamonds at his throat.” "Dare I avow," he adds, "that, as an enemy of the banalities and the dull tones of our modern garments, I was enchanted with the adventure?" And in his charming little essay, "Une Traversée de Bretagne," the same enthusiasm throws about his oboe-playing ship-captain the glamour of romance. On his first trip to the Canaries, made incognito, he is said to have offered himself as a substitute to sing a tenor part in "Le Trouvère,” and to have come near appearing in this incongruous rôle. When his grand opera, "Ascanio," was produced at Paris, he scandalized his friends and the public by being absent from the first performance. Diligent inquiry, and even the efforts of the diplomatic agents of the Government, failed to discover his whereabouts, and it was actually rumored that he had died in Ceylon, on his way to Japan. But all the while he was happily basking in the sun at Palma, scribbling verses. Finally, his fondness for astronomy is well known, and he is said to have a private observatory in some "ultimate island." There is much about this picturesque Frenchman