United States or Equatorial Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Music of wind-instruments resounded from the place, and the din of merry guests was growing louder and louder.
I never heard but one worse roarer in my life, and that was a roan: it belonged to Pegwell, the corn-factor; he used to drive him in his gig seven years ago, and he wanted me to take him, but I said, 'Thank you, Peg, I don't deal in wind-instruments. That was what I said. It went the round of the country, that joke did. But, what the hell! the horse was a penny trumpet to that roarer of yours."
The narrow-chested, round-shouldered person, whose lungs barely oxydize blood enough to maintain life, is not expected to walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours, or to excel as a performer on wind-instruments. We impute to him no fault for this sort of incompetence. We should rather charge him with consummate folly, if he undertook a line of exercises for which he is so clearly unfitted.
While a few believed that wind-instruments, like the organ, were proper and right, yet stringed instruments were harmful and tended to lascivious pleasings. Now there are churches that use the pipe-organ, but allow the use of a piano only in the lecture-room, or guildhouse.
The band was not a very large one, but the performers had been well-taught, and the wind-instruments produced in such a situation a very animating effect. They marched up and down the parade-ground, occasionally relieved by the drums and fifes also playing French music.
The habitation of Donna Violetta was far from the scene of general amusement. Though so remote, the hum of the moving throng, and the higher strains of the wind-instruments, came, from time to time, to the ears of its inmates, mellowed and thrilling by distance. The position of the moon cast the whole of the narrow passage which flowed beneath the windows of her private apartments into shadow.
It is not to be conceived, beforehand, what wonderful wind-instruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and sob, and shriek and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous, in some distant chamber and to tread along the entries as with stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks miraculously stiff whenever the gale catches the house with a window open, and gets fairly into it.
Moreover, one must be a man who knows what he is doing; one must keep a sharp lookout, and not for one second lose sight of what lies before one. A good conductor, interpreting the thought of the composer, does twenty things at once: reads the score, waves his baton, watches the singer, makes a motion sideways, first to the drum then to the wind-instruments, and so on.
The seaman addressed, as soon as he could shove in a word edgewise with the chorus and the numerous wind-instruments of the Forest, answered that 'it was Bill Simpson; and who the blazes was that up there? To which the answer was, that 'it was Dick, and that he should be obliged, if Bill had a rope with him, he would shy up one end of it. Of course we had a rope: an end was shied up, made fast, and down tumbled Master Dick Redhead without his hat, which, in his hurry, it appeared, he had left behind in the banqueting-room.
I have, however, written a note to the Count on the subject, and received a message from him that he would speak to me about it shortly. By heavens! he ought to be thoroughly ashamed of himself. I won't pay a single kreutzer. Munich, Dec. 1, 1780. THE rehearsal went off with extraordinary success; there were only six violins in all, but the requisite wind-instruments.
Word Of The Day