they neglect it.

"But, if we have a proper respect for our intellectual selves, we
should keep them clean and neat, as we do our persons, and seek to
bring out all their faculties to the greatest perfection attainable."

The young man suddenly perceived that he had been soliloquizing aloud,
instead of keeping up the conversation; but the indifference exhibited
by his companion dispelled every fear of having given him offence. With
a sigh it occurred to him, for the hundredth time, how wearisome is the
effort to give currency to any thoughts of a more general and elevated
nature. "If the old teacher is so thick-skinned, what is to be expected
of the farmers?" thought he.

After another pause, our friend began once more:--"Don't you think
people are much more good and pious nowadays, than they were in the old
times?"

"Pious? Devil take it! we weren't so bad in the old times either, only
we didn't make such a fuss about it: too little and too much is lame
without a crutch: ha, ha!"

Another long silence ensued, at the end of which the young man made a
lucky move in asking, "How was it about music in old times?"

A light glistened in the old man's eyes: he held the steel and the
tinder in his hand unused, and said, "It's all tooting nowadays. I was
sub-organist in the Freiburg Cathedral for two years and a half. That's
an organ, let me tell you. I heard the Abbe Vogler: there can't be any
thing finer in heaven than his music was.

"I've played at many a harvest-home, too.

"In old times they had stringed instruments principally, and harps
and cymbals. Now it's all wind,--big trumpets, little trumpets, and
valve-trumpets, all blowing and noise. And what can a musician make at
a harvest-home? Three men used to be plenty: now they want six or
seven. It used to be small room, small bass, and big pay: now it's big
room, double-bass, and half-pay.

"I once travelled through the Schaibach Valley with two comrades; and
the thalers seemed to fly into our pockets as if they had wings. Once
two villages almost exterminated each other because both wanted me to
play at harvest-home the same day."

The old gentleman now passed on to one of his favorite stories of how a
village had been so enchanted with his performance on the violin that
they had made him their schoolmaster: the Government undertook to
install another with dragoons, but the village rebelled and he kept his
office.

"Didn't it injure your standing as a te