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Yet Mr. Thomas White is a good-sized man, and now, at all events, rather overweight for a dragoon. Yesterday came one of those bands of music that seem to itinerate everywhere about the country. It consisted of a young woman who played the harp, a bass-viol player, a fiddler, a flutist, and a bugler, besides a little child, of whom, I suppose, the woman was the mother.

In turning round to rebuke the errant performer, the violinist struck his elbow against a similar projection of the other flutist, and knocked a false note out of that gentleman too, besides momentarily ruffling his temper. This little episode diffused unhappiness over the entire music.

Old Brix, the good-natured flutist, had to stay with us again, for, owing to the fact that his usual receipts had been delayed, he would have been in great straits had we refused to give him shelter.

It was curiously of a piece with the creaking loneliness of the ancient farmhouse and so soft at times that the clash of the frozen branches against the house engulfed it utterly. Sombre, swayed by a surge of deep depression, the flutist lay back in his chair by the fire, piping moodily upon the friend he always carried in his pocket. To-morrow Dick would be off to the girl in Vermont

Yet Mr. Thomas White is a good-sized man, and now, at all events, rather overweight for a dragoon. Yesterday came one of those bands of music that seem to itinerate everywhere about the country. It consisted of a young woman who played the harp, a bass-viol player, a fiddler, a flutist, and a bugler, besides a little child, of whom, I suppose, the woman was the mother.

The flutist Olaf Svenssen and the vocal artists Thorvald Lammers, Ingeborg Oselio-Björnson, and Ellen Gulbranson, have also brought distinction to their country. The male choirs of Norway have always played a leading rôle in the music life of the nation.

Viewed from this standpoint the piano is an instrument apart from every other, except in some respects the organ. A young violinist, 'cellist or flutist has to study for some time before he can produce a tone of good musical quality on his instrument.

One of the company played a cornet badly enough to compel the inhabitants of any civilized town to take to the woods until he had made his departure; another was a flutist of uncertain qualifications, while a third could rasp a little on the violin; and as for Handy himself, he could tackle any other instrument that might be necessary to make up a band; but playing the drum, the bass drum, or the cymbals, was his specialty.

For a long time he had deluged all this hypocritical scheming with gold, with lordly indifference, paying five hundred francs for a ticket to a concert by some Wurtemberg zither-player, or Languedocian flutist, which would have been quoted at ten francs at the Tuileries or the Due de Mora's. On some days young de Géry went out from these sessions actually nauseated.

So anxious did Herr Kreutzer seem to be to keep from winning notice from the outside world, indeed, that when a stranger who might possibly be one of those explorers after merit in dim places appeared there in the little theatre, the other members of the orchestra felt quite sure of wretched playing from the grey-haired flutist.