ring me forty
pounds for my share of it--a very liberal price, which I declined,
my price for one of my readings being invariably _twenty_ pounds. At
the end of the performance one of the gentlemen of the committee
came to pay me my salary, which having done, he expressed himself,
in his own behalf and that of his fellow-managers, greatly obliged
to me for the liberality I had exhibited (honesty, it seems to me)
in not accepting double my usual terms when they offered it to me.
"And," said he, drawing a five-pound note from his pocket-book, "I
really--we really--if you would--if you could--allow us to offer you
five pounds in addition----" The gentleman's voice died away, and he
seemed to be becoming nervous, under the effect of the steadfast
seriousness with which, in spite of the greatest inclination to
burst out laughing, I listened to this strange proposal. The
five-pound note fluttered a little between his finger and thumb, and
for one moment I had a diabolical temptation to twitch it from him
and throw it into the fire. This prompting of Satan, however, I
womanfully resisted, and merely civilly declined the gratuity; and
the gentleman left me with profuse acknowledgments of the service I
had rendered them and my "extreme liberality."

My friend Charles Halle, coming in just at this moment, was thrown
into fits of laughter at the transaction, and my astonishment at it.

Halle was a friend of ours, an admirable musician, and a most
amiable man, and one of the best masters of our modern day. His
style was more remarkable for sensibility, delicacy, and refinement,
than for power or brilliancy of execution; but I preferred his
rendering of Beethoven to that of all the other virtuosi I ever
heard; and some of the hours of greatest musical enjoyment I have
had in my life I owe to him, when he and his friend Joachim, playing
almost, as it seemed, as much for their own delight as ours,
enchanted a small circle of enthusiastic and grateful listeners,
gathered round them in my sister's drawing-room.

Mr. Scott's comment upon my reading gave me great pleasure. "It was
good," he said, "from beginning to end; but you _are_ Theseus."
Oddly enough, a similar compliment was paid me in the same words at
the end of a reading that I gave for the Working Men's Institute in
Brighton, when my