er why that particular family of
Smiths, with whom you have the pleasure of an acquaintance has not yet
appeared. You think Miss Julia Brown's hair arranged with the usual want
of elegance, and then call to mind the fact that at Newport, the
previous summer, you complimented her so many times on the peculiar
taste which her coiffure always displayed. The aforesaid drummer is now
giving the drum considerable ill usage, and then for the first time, you
observe that he has two of them which he appears to beat alternately.
The director is casting his head from one side to the other, flashes of
disapprobation dart from his eyes upon the dilatory violinists, who from
time to time, stop as it were, to catch breath, and fail to "come to the
scratch" in due season. Every now and then a frown, dark as Erebus,
spreads over his brow, as some poor laggard is astray in the mazes of
sound, and can't find his place, or turns two pages instead of one, and
consequently loses the thread of his harmonious discourse. The music
grows so powerful that the conversation of the most enthusiastic and
vociferous fast man no longer meets the ear. The orchestra is going as
if they were riding an instrumental steeple chase, and the director
looks more and more involved in doubt, as to which of his followers is
to be left most in the rear.

At length when you have concluded that every musician has exhausted his
last resource in the general attempt to make a noise, you are knocked
into a start of astonishment by the introduction of a _corps de
reserve_, in the clash of cymbals, which sounds as if a careless servant
had stumbled in coming up stairs and mashed an entire set of Sevres
china. In the midst of this carnage of crotchets and quavers, the
director is obviously the controlling spirit who "rides in the whirlwind
and directs the storm." There he sits producing no one sound except an
occasional rap of his baton on the desk, and yet rousing to frenzy or
lulling into tranquillity the instruments of all this tumult, every now
and then, as Mr. Macaulay would say, "hurling foul scorn" at the heaps
of little black dots that are crowded over the leaves of his score.

When the intensity of the tones has been diminished and augmented some
half dozen times, the overture is concluded in four grand crashes, in
which the cymbals make the most conspicuous figure. During the overture,
however, there seems to be occasional seasons when there is a cessation
of hos