e meal with
a three-part song and shouts of laughter.

Mendelssohn's heart was easily touched by the distresses of others,
and when he learnt of the sufferings of those who had lost their all
in the floods in Silesia at this time, he set to work at once to
arrange a concert in their behalf. The 'Midsummer Night's Dream
Overture' formed one of the items of the programme--this being the
second occasion of its performance since his arrival. It was most
enthusiastically received, and, indeed, the whole concert was a great
success. The room was so besieged that no fewer than one hundred
persons were turned from the doors. Ladies who could not find seats in
the body of the hall crowded upon the orchestra, and Mendelssohn was
delighted at receiving a message from two elderly ladies, who had
strayed between the bassoons and the French horns, anxiously inquiring
'whether they were likely to hear well!' Another enthusiastic lady
esconsced herself contentedly upon a kettledrum. There could be little
doubt that the overture had secured a firm hold upon English hearts at
its first hearing. Jules Benedict, who was present on the occasion,
describes the effect upon the audience as electrical. At the end of
the first performance a friend who had taken charge of the precious
manuscript was so careless as to leave it in a hackney-coach on his
way home, and it was never recovered. 'Never mind,' said Mendelssohn,
when the loss was reported to him, 'I will write another.' And he sat
down at once and rewrote the score entirely from memory, and when the
copy was afterwards compared with the parts it was found that he had
not made a single variation.

From London, when the season came to an end, he went in company with
his friend Klingemann to Scotland, his keen sense of perception
drinking in all the variety and charm which the tour presented, and
his genius supplying a musical setting to whatever struck him as
specially beautiful. The ruined chapel attached to the old Palace of
Holyrood, seen in the twilight, with its broken altar at which Mary
received the Scottish crown, overgrown with grass and ivy, and its
mouldering, roofless pillars, with patches of bright sky between, gave
him the first inspiration for his Scotch Symphony. But it was the
Hebrides which, in their lonely grandeur and bleakness, affected him
most of all. Of Iona, with its ruins of a once magnificent cathedral,
and its graves of ancient Scottish Kings, he writes that he