would have thought it a nuisance to write to his own brother, if so be he had had such a relative to bless himself with.
Lewis Peckham did not complain of his lot in detail, and he never made the least effort to better it. There was only one thing he really wanted, and that thing he could not have. He wanted to be "something big" in the way of a musician. Not merely to be master of this or that instrument; certainly not to teach reluctant young people their scales and arpeggios. What he had intended to become was a great composer—a composer of symphonies and operas—the First Great American Composer, spelled, be it observed, with capital letters. He was not destined to the disillusionment of direct failure, which in all human probability would have been his. Fate spared him that by visiting him in the beginning of his career with an attack of pneumonia which sent him fleeing for his life to the sunshine and high air of the Rocky Mountain region. Peckham was always rather ashamed of having fled for his life, which, as he repeatedly assured himself, was by no means worth the purchase. Yet with him as with most men, even when thwarted in what they believe to be a great ambition, the instinct of life is as imperative
