Prominent amongst these are Pecksniff, who, like Morfin, hums melodiously, and Micawber, who can both sing and hum.  Nor must we omit to mention Miss Petowker, who ’hummed a tune’ as her contribution to the entertainment at Mrs. Kenwigs’ party.  Many of the characters resort to humming to conceal their temporary discomfiture, and perhaps no one ever hummed under more harassing circumstances than when Mr. Pecksniff had to go to the door to let in some very unwelcome guests, who had already knocked several times.  But he was a past master in the art of dissimulation.  He is particularly anxious to conceal from his visitors the fact that Jonas Chuzzlewit is in the house.  So he says to the latter—­

’This may be a professional call.  Indeed I am pretty sure it is.  Thank you.’  Then Mr. Pecksniff, gently warbling a rustic stave, put on his garden hat, seized a spade, and opened the street door; calmly appearing on the threshold as if he thought he had, from his vineyard, heard a modest rap, but was not quite certain.

Then he tells his visitors ‘I do a little bit of Adam still.’  He certainly had a good deal of the old Adam in him.

Clarionet

The clarionet is associated with the fortunes of Mr. Frederick Dorrit, who played the instrument at the theatre where his elder niece was a dancer, and where Little Dorrit sought an engagement.  After the rehearsal was over she and her sister went to take him home.

He had been in that place six nights a week for many years, but had never been observed to raise his eyes above his music-book....  The carpenters had a joke that he was dead without being aware of it.

At the theatre he had no part in what was going on except the part written for the clarionet.  In his young days his house had been the resort of singers and players.  When the fortunes of the family changed his clarionet was taken away from him, on the ground that it was a ‘low instrument.’  It was subsequently restored to him, but he never played it again.

Of quite a different stamp was one of the characters in Going into Society, who played the clarionet in a band at a Wild Beast Show, and played it all wrong.  He was somewhat eccentric in dress, as he had on ’a white Roman shirt and a bishop’s mitre covered with leopard skin.’  We are told nothing about him, except that he refused to know his old friends.  In his story of the Seven Poor Travellers Dickens found the clarionet-player of the Rochester Waits so communicative that he accompanied the party across an open green called the Vines,

    and assisted—­in the French sense—­at the performance
    of two waltzes, two polkas, and three Irish melodies.

Bassoon

A notable bassoon player was Mr. Bagnet, who had a voice somewhat resembling his instrument.  The ex-artilleryman kept a little music shop in a street near the Elephant and Castle.  There were