ri play to their dancing. Blow, bagpipes, a storm of harmony!
become trumpets, trombones, ophicleides, fiddles, and bassoons! Fire,
guns sound, tocsins! Shout, people! Louder, shriller and sweeter than
all, sing thou, ravishing heroine! And see, on his cream-coloured
charger Massaniello prances in, and Fra Diavolo leaps down the balcony,
carabine in hand; and Sir Huon of Bordeaux sails up to the quay with the
Sultan's daughter of Babylon. All these delights and sights, and joys
and glories, these thrills of sympathy, movements of unknown longing,
and visions of beauty, a young sickly lad of eighteen enjoys in a little
dark room where there is a bed disguised in the shape of a wardrobe, and
a little old woman is playing under a gas-lamp on the jingling keys of
an old piano.

For a long time Mr. Samuel Ridley, butler and confidential valet to
the Right Honourable John James Baron Todmorden, was in a state of the
greatest despair and gloom about his only son, the little John James,--a
sickly and almost deformed child "of whom there was no making nothink,"
as Mr. Ridley said. His figure precluded him from following his father's
profession, and waiting upon the British nobility, who naturally require
large and handsome men to skip up behind their rolling carriages, and
hand their plates at dinner. When John James was six years old his
father remarked, with tears in his eyes, he wasn't higher than a
plate-basket. The boys jeered at him in the streets--some whopped him,
spite of his diminutive size. At school he made but little progress.
He was always sickly and dirty, and timid and crying, whimpering in
the kitchen away from his mother; who, though she loved him, took Mr.
Ridley's view of his character, and thought him little better than an
idiot until such time as little Miss Cann took him in hand, when at
length there was some hope of him.

"Half-witted, you great stupid big man," says Miss Cann, who had a fine
spirit of her own. "That boy half-witted! He has got more wit in his
little finger than you have in all your great person! You are a very
good man, Ridley, very good-natured I'm sure, and bear with the teasing
of a waspish old woman: but you are not the wisest of mankind. Tut,
tut, don't tell me. You know you spell out the words when you read the
newspaper still, and what would your bills look like if I did not write
them in my nice little hand? I tell you that boy is a genius. I tell you
that one day the world will