h in Liverpool, says:--

"For the last twenty years I have been continuously engaged with male
voice choirs in connection with churches too poor to pay for adult help,
and, as you may readily guess, I have never yet had the good fortune to
secure, for any length, the services of gentlemen who could sing
falsetto effectively. I have had, therefore, to rely solely upon my boys
for the alto part. At the present time my choir, which is allowed to be
up to the mark amongst local Liverpool churches, is made up of 22 boys
(18 treble and 4 alto) paid, and 14 adults (5 tenors and 9 basses)
voluntary. There is, I find, no royal road to the alto part. My course
is as follows. I obtain my boys as soon as they are eleven, by which age
they have been made fairly familiar at my school with the old notation
on the movable _do_ plan. Theoretical instruction is continued side by
side with special voice-training exercises. Occasionally I meet with a
boy who has a true mezzo-soprano voice, and he is a treasure, but in the
main my selections are boys with treble voices. As soon as a treble
shows signs of voice breaking, I let him down into the alto part. The
transition is not very difficult, for by this time the boy has become a
fairly good Sol-faist and reader. I have but to adapt the voice-training
exercises to him in company with his fellows, and I have no reason to
regret the issue. I take my boys always together, with two-part
exercises."

Mr. Stocks Hammond, organist and choirmaster of St. Barnabas, Bradford,
in a published paper on "Boys' Voices," says:--

"During many years of choir training, I have experienced very great
difficulty in supplying the alto parts with _good_ men's falsetto voices
(especially in voluntary choirs), and I have therefore been compelled to
have that part sung by boys, and experience leads me to prefer the boys'
voices to men's, unless, indeed, they are real alto voices, which are
seldom to be met with. I have never yet had any great difficulty in
finding boys' voices capable of sustaining that part, and can always
fill up any gaps that occur by the following means. Whenever I find a
treble begins to experience a difficulty in singing the upper notes, and
that in order to sing them he must strain his voice, immediately he is
put to sing alto, which he is in most cases able to do for one or two
years, and during that time he is thus retained as a useful member of
the choir; for otherwise he would very soon