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Updated: June 28, 2025
The subject was dropped, but after breakfast, as the crunch of the horse's feet sounded, Janice left the spinet for a moment to look out of the window, and it was a very doleful and pitiful face she took back to her task five minutes later. When master and man drew rein in front of the Brunswick Court-house, it was obvious to the least heedful that something unusual was astir.
The Schuylers were one of the few families in those days that possessed a musical instrument, and it had been the delight of Marcia’s heart. She seemed to have a natural talent for music, and many an hour she spent at the old spinet drawing tender tones from the yellowed keys. The spinet had been in the family for a number of years and very proud had the Schuyler girls been of it.
Ben Upham came for his sisters. "I don't see why they couldn't have had boys," said Ben to Polly. "Ever so many of us would have been glad to come." "Well, we didn't have any real boys' plays. But the supper was elegant. And 'Mimy waited so nicely. Cynthia's going to have the back parlor for hers, and Mr. Leverett has bought a new spinet. And she has the most beautiful things "
The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the vision of a drawing-room in Addison Gardens, occupied by his mother and sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's substitutes at the moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed sense that they might characterise such a statement differently, if, indeed, they would consent to characterise it at all.
Here in the drawing-room he set himself down to a spinet which bore the date of 1770, and he struck a few exceedingly sweet-sounding, if slightly tinkling, chords from it. "And this," said he, "is the oldest Broadwood in England. You can see for yourself the date 1795." Downstairs he showed me a beautiful model of a steam engine, upon which he was enabled to ride, and which he could drive himself.
To music, instinctively, more and more he was dedicate; and in his desire to refine and organise the court music, from which, by leave of absence to official performers enjoying their salaries at a distance, many parts had literally fallen away, like the favourite notes of a worn-out spinet, he was ably seconded by a devoted youth, the deputy organist of the grand-ducal chapel.
In a corner of the room there stood a little spinet, which not one of them had noticed before. Snandulia sat down to it and struck several chords. Nejdanov had never heard such sour, toneless, tingling, jangling notes, but the old people promptly struck up the ballad, "Was it to Mourn." Fomisha began "In love God gave a heart Of burning passion to inspire That loving heart with warm desire."
But as I ran up the stairs, I heard the tinkle of the spinet, and the notes of an old, familiar tune fell upon my ears. The words rose in my head with the cadence. "Love me little, love me long, Is the burthen of my song, Love that is too hot and strong Runneth soon to waste." That simple air, already mellowed by an hundred years, had always been her favourite.
And she turned to the spinet and began a lively air. But the taunt struck deeper than she had any notion of. That spring arrived out from London on the Belle of the Wye a box of fine clothes my grandfather had commanded for me from his own tailor; and a word from a maid of fifteen did more to make me wear them than any amount of coaxing from Mr. Allen and my Uncle Grafton.
I remember some of the pieces of furniture still, though I think I was only once or twice in the room all the time we were there. There were two or three old-fashioned cabinets or bureaux; there was a regular four-post bedstead, with the gloomy curtains still hanging round it; and ever so many spider-legged chairs and rickety tables; and I rather think in one corner there was a spinet.
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