the
devil am I to compose that march they want with this room still as the
dead? Now I go back, and if you don't do those scales, all smooth and
even, and the exercises rightly timed, you--well, you know what you'll
get! I can hear, even if I am composing. So you get to work, quick now!
before I get back to my table!"

And he tore off again, while, with clammy fingers, I sat down to the
wretched old piano, that was showing its teeth at me in a senile grin,
and feebly and uncertainly began to wobble up and down the keyboard.

Mrs. Navoni afterward told me that when her husband returned to his work
he hummed to himself a few moments, jotted down a few notes, listened to
the sound of the rattling old piano, and, smiling and nodding, remarked:
"_Now_ I can do something--_one_, two, three--_one_, two, three--that's
right. I couldn't compose a bar with her wasting a precious hour down
there. She keeps good time, eh, doesn't she? Now I'll give the boys
something that will move their feet for them!" and he returned to the
march.

The thing which I was to get if I failed to practise correctly was so
unusual that I feel I must explain it. Mr. Navoni wore an artificial foot
and leg of the cumbrous type then offered to the afflicted, and in the
privacy of his own room he used to remove the burdensome thing and lay it
on a chair by the couch on which he rested or read or wrote, and when I,
down-stairs, made a first mistake in my practice, he growled and kicked
viciously with his "for-true" leg, while a second blunder would make him
seize his store-leg and pound the floor. Then when I began again he would
whack the correct time with it with such emphasis that bits of my ceiling
would come rattling down about me and the gas-fixture threatened not to
remain a fixture.

Another trick of his was to bring down his violin with him. How my heart
sank when I saw it, and, my lesson over, he requested me to play such or
such an exercise: "And keep to your own business, and leave my business
to me, if you please, Miss. _Now!_"

I was then expected to go over and over that exercise and keep perfect
time, while he stood behind me and improvised on the violin, growing more
and more distracting every moment, and if that led my attention away from
my _one_, two, three, what a crack I got across the top of my ear from
his fiddle-bow, and a sharp order to: "Go back--go back! _one_, two,
three; _one_, two, three! Cry by and by, but now play! _One_