Shepherd's Bush, without quite knowing where she wants to go to. How is
she ever to get safe back to Clapham Junction? And Clapham Junction
won't quite do either, for Clapham Junction is like the diminished
seventh--susceptible of such enharmonic change, that you can resolve it
into all the possible termini of music."

Talking of music reminds me of a little passage that took place between
Ernest and Miss Skinner, Dr Skinner's eldest daughter, not so very long
ago. Dr Skinner had long left Roughborough, and had become Dean of a
Cathedral in one of our Midland counties--a position which exactly suited
him. Finding himself once in the neighbourhood Ernest called, for old
acquaintance sake, and was hospitably entertained at lunch.

Thirty years had whitened the Doctor's bushy eyebrows--his hair they
could not whiten. I believe that but for that wig he would have been
made a bishop.

His voice and manner were unchanged, and when Ernest remarking upon a
plan of Rome which hung in the hall, spoke inadvertently of the Quirinal,
he replied with all his wonted pomp: "Yes, the QuirInal--or as I myself
prefer to call it, the QuirInal." After this triumph he inhaled a long
breath through the corners of his mouth, and flung it back again into the
face of Heaven, as in his finest form during his head-mastership. At
lunch he did indeed once say, "next to impossible to think of anything
else," but he immediately corrected himself and substituted the words,
"next to impossible to entertain irrelevant ideas," after which he seemed
to feel a good deal more comfortable. Ernest saw the familiar volumes of
Dr Skinner's works upon the bookshelves in the Deanery dining-room, but
he saw no copy of "Rome or the Bible--Which?"

"And are you still as fond of music as ever, Mr Pontifex?" said Miss
Skinner to Ernest during the course of lunch.

"Of some kinds of music, yes, Miss Skinner, but you know I never did like
modern music."

"Isn't that rather dreadful?--Don't you think you rather"--she was going
to have added, "ought to?" but she left it unsaid, feeling doubtless that
she had sufficiently conveyed her meaning.

"I would like modern music, if I could; I have been trying all my life to
like it, but I succeed less and less the older I grow."

"And pray, where do you consider modern music to begin?"

"With Sebastian Bach."

"And don't you like Beethoven?"

"No, I used to think I did, when I was younger, but I know now that