Norah, look

The girl was beautiful. ing at the liquid flashing eyes that seemed never surfeited nor weary, rarely dulled by inward speculation, quick, searching, and responsive; at the sensitive sweet mouth that never gave idle compliments nor temporized; at the tiny ears detecting every artificial note; at the faint pink shoulders shrugging themselves from the edgings of her bed-gown in an argument, -found the cultivated loveliness of Grace Skene incredibly diminished by comparison. Her old beliefs in race and breeding were most awkwardly upset; she failed to see in what respect a mansion-house could have produced a finer body; half the mansions in the neighborhood would benefit by such

common-sense.

"Why did you leave home?" she asked her one day, sitting on her bed.

"I'm the youngest of six daughters, all unmarried," replied Penelope. "Six unmarried daughters in a small manse with a kind of dear old Christian Socialist for a father, a love for pretty things, and a decent elementary education, make a very explosive mixture. It exploded, and I found a situation."

"I wish," said Norah, "the explosion had carried you a little farther, and landed you somewhere else than with my friend Grace Skene. Why! you must have been continually quarrelling. I know her!"

"We were," confessed Penelope. "It was that which made me stay for the last two years with her. You see, when she was in her tantrums, she was nearly always in the wrong; a woman spoiled as she has been could hardly help it. When we quarrelled it was like a tonic to my self-respect; I felt superior, and forgot all about her wages. It was like being back in the manse again with my sister Peggy. The more she stormed the more composed was I, and it made her mad.”

"You must have an enviable temper!" said Nora admiringly.

"I haven't. It's a beast! But it's just the ordinary average temper for a woman. Her furies are all fire; mine are are splintered ice; that's the only difference," and she laughed with all her heart. "I know I should be sorry; it's a sin," she proceeded, "but I'm not, and I can't pretend to be. I feel it's good for me to quarrel with ill-temper and selfishness. Father used to say. that anger acts like poison in the blood; I don't believe one word of it! a good rage makes me feel grand when it's over. If Miss Skene was always dignified, and cool, and what she ought to be, I would have left her long ago. Lord! I couldn't stand that! It would make me feel so small and servile. Wouldn't you feel like that?"and she leaned across to her nurse with the engaging frankness of a child.

"I daresay I would," said Norah, kissing her, for already they were friends. "But I'm sure I shouldn't put up with more than a week of Grace. I'm afraid she hasn't much of a heart."

"Oh, there's worse! there's worse!" pleaded Penelope, with a tone that brought out another of her qualitiesforgiveness. "She has as good a heart as can be made out of brains. And when she's nice she's almost jolly. I'm certain she's annoyed with herself already."

She could forgive Miss Skene her tantrums, and even, apparently, her desertion, but not so readily could she forgive the imposition of Sir Andrew, who had made her look ridiculous to herself. Even yet her face would burn when she thought of her indiscretion. It was no excuse for her, she knew, that she should have chattered to him only in her ignorance of his identity, but the offence began with him. "It was too bad!" she declared, "and you can tell him so from me. I abominate

the kind of joke that starts with falsehood."

"But it wasn't exactly falsehood with my cousin," protested Norah. "He was Tom Dunn for the occasion, and if you knew him as well as I do, you would understand that he kept up the character for the sake of Mrs. Nish, whose post-hiring business would suffer badly if it were generally known that she let jocular amateurs drive her landau. Why are you so unforgiving?"

"I suppose it's just my vanity," confessed Penelope. "When I think of it I feel so-so small. I was taken at a disadvantage; it was cowardly. And I hope I'll never meet him, for I'll tell him so."

For three or four weeks she was certainly not to meet him, but still he got to know her day by day more intimately; day by day with more surprise and curiosity. Norah would come from the patient's bedroom betraying her amusement at some new phase of that rebel nature; Captain Cutlass had a full report of everything.

"Why!" he would cry, “she's splendid! I'm sorry she won't forgive me, but she's right. When will she be able to be out? I'm all impatience."

"Tehk! tehk! Andrew," said Amelia in despair. "A saucy" but she suddenly checked herself, at the disapproval of his countenance.

"What are her imperfections?" he demanded from his cousin. "You've been telling me of nothing but her merits."

"I didn't say she had any imperfections," answered Norah, smiling.

"Good Lord!" said Captain Cutlass hurriedly. "I hope she's not inhuman. But no: I remember! At least she has a fiery temper; I heard it in her very first words to me on Duntryne quay, and I saw it in her eyes when I made to help her to her feet on the riverside. But after all, temper's hardly an imperfection. There's a frightful

kind of tame submission in some of your sex compared with which the violence of a virago is a virtue. There must be something else-ah! I remember; a strained, high, unrefined inflection in her voice, not quite pleasant, when she was contradictory. Women should have quiet, sweet, level voices, even when they're furious."

"I see nothing wrong with her voice," protested Norah. "It seems to me rather pretty and musical."

"Probably; but you never had the chance, perhaps, to hear it with the piccolo-stop out. I thought it pretty most of the time too,-at least it had possibilities in it, with a little training. Why women should learn to sing before they have learned to speak is a thing I could never understand. They're speaking all the time, and they're only sometimes singing. They might as well learn to dance before they have learned to walk."

"Oh! if it's a highly cultivated young person you expect to find in Pen," said Norah, "you'll be disappointed. She's quite untutored and undisciplined, as naïve as a child."

"Ah!" exclaimed Sir Andrew on a high note, hopefully, "that's good! That's promising! I like that! Your amiable friend Miss Skene has made me more dubious than ever of what passes for cultivation and the discipline of conventional good breeding."

"Nonsense!" answered Norah bluntly. "You cry for a disciplined speaking voice in one breath, and condemn discipline and good breeding in the next. You might at least be consistent."

"Please God, not!" he exclaimed. "I'd sooner be impulsive. 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.'"

"She's impulsive enough, if that should please you. She says what comes into her head first."

"Better and better!" exclaimed Captain Cutlass, rubbing his hands to

gether between his knees. "I never know myself what I'm going to say till I have said it;" and Miss Amelia turned up her eyes in despair at such a scatter-brained confession.

"But Penelope's impulsiveness,” said Norah quietly, "is apt to be followed by the same regrets that it brings to common mortals. Her annoyance with you is wounded pride; she feels that you had her at a disadvantage when she was indiscreet."

"Yes," said Sir Andrew, "that was another thing. Even if I had been Dunn, she was indiscreet. She hurt me a little twice-by a reference to my marriage, and-another matter. Never mind! I could never have been so indiscreet as that myself, nor you. But of course we've had advantages." "Oh, she's imprudent

"I'm glad to hear it," said Sir Andrew, laughing. "Prudence is nearly always fear. 'I was never afraid of anything except myself,' she said when my horses jibbed, and I could believe her. She's a perfect Stoic. You've been trying to show me her imperfections, and—”

"I haven't," protested Norah.

“I find they're all virtues. She's independent, contradictory, self-willed, confident in her own convictions, spontaneous, with no duplicity, clever. I believe a year of your society and the run of your book-shelves would make her perfect."

"But that would be to spoil her, wouldn't it, Andy?" said Norah mockingly. "You wouldn't have Penelope inhuman?"

"You don't exactly catch what I mean," said Captain Cutlass, looking with abstraction at his cousin's profile and a little curl of hair upon her temple.

For a month the room where Penelope lay was the heart of the house; for every house has a special chamber whence the pulse of it is derived, even

if it only be the kitchen. She had kicked Mrs. Powrie's pillows to the foot of her bed, impatient at the very sight of embroidered monograms representing weary hours of foolish fancywork that spoiled the pillow for its proper purpose, and sat for hours reading Miss Amelia's novels. Mrs. Powrie would go in to her, and be, for twenty minutes at a time, a kind of mother; Norah's frequent, longer visits, were the visits of a sister, and made the days too short: a broken limb seemed to be the best of fortune.

By-and-by she could rise; a little later, venture out of doors to see the gold of the lilies and hear the lark and the mavis singing, and no longer could her meeting with her enemy be averted. He came upon her one day sitting under the veranda. There is a happy eye continually making pictures out of things familiar, even commonplace, and Captain Cutlass, coming on her suddenly, thought the unpretentious front of his house enlivened by her presence. It seemed as if she had been there for years-since the old unrepenetrable times when he was a sailor coming home with eyes seawearied, to look again with delight on the green of the rhododendrons. Jean had sat there sometimes; Norah often -how like, in some respects, the stranger was to his cousin!

"I'm delighted to see you out," he told her, taking her hand and sitting down beside her.

"Thank you," said Penelope, and then, more warmly, "everybody has been so good!"

"Though we began badly," he suggested, and saw at once he had blundered, for she reddened.

"It's not improving the situation to bring that up again," she said coldly. "I have been trying to forget it."

"Pardon me." said Sir Andrew softly; "that was not what I was thinking of; I was alluding to your accident.

"Why not?" she replied. "Except that you-you told me a lie to begin with. I didn't like it. I don't like it. I suppose it's because I never could lie myself. I've tried it; sometimes it would be useful, but somehow it makes you feel as if you were dirty. I'm always for the downright truth!"

She spoke with a flurried ardency, breathing short between her sentences, looking him straight in the eyes without a quiver of her lashes, and he was seized with a tremendous admiration.

"That is right!" he said, "absolutely right! And I hope that you will learn by-and-by that dissimulation is as distasteful to myself as it is to you. Why! Fancy Farm is quite an inappropriate name for this place; it is the palace of truth. Norah's exactly like you in that particular; she hates any form of falsehood, either sentimentalism or affectation, and I'm-" He stopped, reflected for a moment, and chuckled. "I reserve the right to be harmlessly mendacious when the wind's northwest.

I like you!"

He delivered this finding with a hot impetuosity, and she could not doubt the candor of his eyes; but neither could she forego the obvious retort.

"That's nice!" she said. "But I suppose the wind's north-west at present."

He was charmed; he had never before met any one quite like her, except in some respects his cousin. She made him think of the free wild moor and morning walks there, for folk to Captain Cutlass often had some spirit of a certain place and weather. For halfan-hour they sat together in the foreBlackwood's Magazine.

noon sun; Miss Amelia, disapproving at a window, wondered at what they laughed so much. Penelope put all his whimsical ideas to the test of prose, like another Jamie Birrell; he delighted in her spirit of dissent, in one who spoke without reserve, with the bold unconsciousness of childhood.

"I envy Miss Skene the stimulation of your contradiction," he declared, and a shadow came to her face.

"Miss Skene," she replied, "will have to dispense with that sort of stimulus in future; I'm not going back to her. I told her so before she left, and she probably doesn't believe it, but I always ride when I saddle, as my father says."

"Norah!" he cried, running into the house, and his cousin came hurriedly to see what caused this peremptory man

ner.

"Do you know," he asked eagerly, "that Penelope is not going back to your friend Miss Skene?"

"I don't," said Norah, smiling. "She seems to have taken you into her confidence again pretty readily, considering the way you have already abused it."

"You must keep her here!" he went on impetuously.

"In what capacity?" asked his cousin quietly.

"You are as much in need of a companion as Miss Skene."

"Not quite," she replied. "I've always you and Aunt Amelia, andthere's often Reginald. I like Penelope immensely, she's so like myself in some respects, and seems sometimes to remind me of a sister I never had. But I couldn't engage the girl who saved my life to put up my hair, even if I didn't find it better for my health to do so for myself."

"If you don't make some arrangement whereby she'll stay, I'll marry her, offhand, myself!" said Captain Cutlass.

The most popular of the greater musical instruments is also the youngest.

In the Church St. Cecilia's spokesman is the organ; in the theatre, at the Symphony concert, and out of doors the orchestra or band; in the cottage, owing to its cheapness, the reed organ or harmonium. Elsewhere music without a piano is almost non-existent.

With the exception of the organ, the instrument is unknown, solos on which are complete without a piano-forte accompaniment. Three voices or instruments must combine before the performers can bid defiance to the piano. Unaccompanied duets-save as exercises are virtually unknown.

So

The instrument is ubiquitous. The house without one is unfurnished. is even the gentleman's yacht and the small passenger steamer. Music is studied through the medium of the piano more than through the voice and all other instruments put together. A scrutiny of a number of British Examination returns shows that eighty-two percent of the examinees are pianoforte students.

Other subjects, including the voice and theory, only muster eighteen per cent.

And yet, compared with instruments of the harp and flute type, the piano is a thing of yesterday. Dame Nature does not always set her seeds and germs in the soil most suitable for them. Has not the thistle grown much more luxuriantly in Australia than in Scotland, and the rabbit increased faster there than in its native climes? Nor is it in the animal and vegetable world only that extraordinary developments have followed from transplantation. The world of art can furnish parallel examples. Thus, there are four ways in which a taut

string can be made to yield a musical note. It can be plucked, as in the harp; scraped, as in the fiddle; tapped, as in the dulcimer; and blown across, as in the Eolian harp. Two of these have produced revolutions in the musical world. But both were known for centuries before the revolution took place. And the revolution in neither case occurred in the original home of the germinal instrument, but was a result of transplantation. It arose not from discovery of an acoustical fact, but recognition of its possibilities. During the greater part of the world's history instruments played with the fingers or a plectrum, chiefly the lyre and harp, held sway. Those played with the bow were known only in India. They had at most but two strings, and were comparatively insignificant. It was not till the Crusaders brought the Oriental "ugab" into Europe that the immense superiority of the bow over the fingers as a means of eliciting sound from a string began to be discovered-to the overthrow of instruments whose supremacy had been unquestioned from the time of Jubal. Similarly instruments in which the strings were made to vibrate by the impact of a little hammer have been known, especially in Persia and Arabia, from a remote antiquity. Yet it was not in Persia or Arabia, but in Italy, and not till the eighteenth century A.D., that the full possibilities of the little hammer system began to unfold themselves.

The law of succession in things mechanical would seem to be as fond of passing over a generation and of deriving from collateral branches as is the law of heredity. The father of the pianoforte in point of time was the harpsichord, and its mother the spinet or virginal, a smaller form of the same