confession to make, and proceeds from want of education and instruction, but I fear any appreciation of music I have is purely literary.  I love a song and a ‘tune;’ the humblest fiddler has sometimes given me the greatest pleasure, and sometimes gone to my heart; but music, properly so called, the only music that many of my friends would listen to, is to me a wonder and a mystery.  My mind wanders through adagios and andantes, gaping, longing to understand.  Will no one tell me what it means?  I want to find the old unhappy far off things which Wordsworth imagined in the Gaelic song of the ‘Highland Lass.’  I feel out of it, uneasy, thinking all the time what a poor creature I must be.  I remember the mother of the sonata players approaching me with beaming countenance on the occasion of one of these performances, expecting the compliment which I faltered forth, doing my best not to look insincere.  ’And I have this every evening of my life,’ cried the triumphant mother.  ’Good heavens, and you have survived it all’ was my internal response.”  But the worst thing is when you do not expect a musical evening and this superior music is sprung on you.  Mrs. Webster and I were once invited to meet some very interesting people, some of the best conversationalists in Melbourne, and we were given high-class music instead, and scarcely could a remark be exchanged when a warning finger was held up and silence insisted on.  I could not sing, but sometimes I attempted to hum a tune.  I recollect during my first visit to Melbourne, my little nephew Johnnie, delighted in the rhymes and poems which I recited; but one day when I was ironing I began to sing, and he burst out with “Don’t sing, auntie; let me hear the voice of your words.”  So for my own delectation I began Wordsworth’s “Leechgatherer”—­

    There was a roaring in the wind all night,
    The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
    But now the sun is rising calm and bright. 
    The birds are singing in the distant woods;
    Over his own sweet voice the stock dove broods. 
    The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters,
    And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.

“Oh, that’s pretty, auntie; say it again,” I said it again, and yet again, at his request, till he could almost repeat it.  And he was not quite 4 years old.  He is still alive, and has not become a poet, which was what I expected in those early days.  He could repeat great screeds of Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin,” which was his especial favourite.  Music has often cheated me of what is to me the keenest pleasure in life.  Like Samuel Johnson, I enjoy greatly “good talk,” though I never took such a dominant part in it.  There are two kinds of people who reduce me to something like silence—­those who know too little and those who know too much.  My brother-in-law’s friend, Mr. Cowan, was a great talker, and a good one, but he scarcely allowed me a fair share.  He was also an admirable correspondent.