The people in this little inn are most agreeable, and do all they can for us. Pray, observe how clever we have been in getting wrecked close to such a convenient place, where we meet with all the care and attention that shipwrecked mariners can desire! The locksman and his assistant have made themselves most useful in helping us all day, and half our things are at the lock-house. We have had to empty the catamaran by baling, as the pump is lost—an immense loss, not to be replaced in a moment. With out the pump it is in vain to think of proceeding on our voyage.

THE

LETTER X.

voyage has been unanimously abandoned for this year, and we have come back to Chalon on the steamer. The catamaran has come too. It goes beautifully on the deck of a steamer, and does not sink!

A group of our friends waited for us on the quay, and laughed most heartily at our misadventure. As for me, that kind of good-natured laughter does not hurt my feelings in the least; a cold sneer makes me angry, but good honest laughter at an absurd situation is, I think, perfectly inoffensive; and we liked our hospitable Chalon friends all the better for their kindly interest in our fate. I realized the difference the next morning, when a slovenly bourgeois came and examined the catamaran, and smiled at it and sneered. Without being generally disposed to violence, I did feel tempted to box his ears.

me a boat which he had built with his own hands, a regular rowing-boat, in which none of the difficulties of construction had been shirked, and with sufficiently good lines to get up some speed, proved by the winning of several prizes. We had a very interesting conversation on the art of making wooden structures watertight by coopers' methods, during which he sketched a variety of forms which a cooper could deal with. M. Pécot's catamaran (1843) was built like a barrel, but the cooper's principle of excluding water by the tightness resulting from the pressure of damp wood can be applied to many other forms. The cooper told me that the only reason why Burgundy wine-casks have curved staves is because they make the casks easier to roll; in Bordeaux the curve is much slighter. It seems to me, however, that the staves in a perfectly cylindrical cask could not be tightened as they are in a bulging one by simply driving the hoops farther up. Amongst the useful arts which have been long practised, that of barrel-making is one of those which require the most perfect workmanship. An author or a preacher may leave holes and crevices in his argument, and a painter may be inaccurate in drawing, so few can discover the deficiency; but Nature herself points out the defect in a cooper's work when the wine leaks between the staves. We had a talk about the effects of leakage, and I was told, what I have often heard before (but can it be true?), that a drop at a time will empty a cask in one night. If this is so, we may easily understand the leakage of boats, and how a boat will fill through a crevice not to be detected with the naked eye.

All the people on the steamer were as civil and friendly as possible, and the captain only charged ten francs for us and the boat together. At Chalon I have found a lodging for the catamaran during the winter in a warehouse close to the quay, belonging to a cooper, who was amply repaid for his civility to me in a very peculiar fashion. As he was clearing away his barrels to leave an empty corner for the catamaran, he found a cask of wine which had been left neglected there for some time, and had burst all its hoops except one, without, however, as yet spilling a drop. The wine was valuable, and the owner rejoiced in my coming, which had revealed the danger. Having removed the bung with the greatest caution, he emptied the cask with a siphon, and felt so happy about it that he looked upon me and the catamaran with the friendliest eyes. He made me taste the wine, which was good Burgundy, just ready for use. He showed

*

So now, with the catamaran safe in a cooper's warehouse and the tents lodged in an attic, we have said good-by to the Saône for this year. People condole with me about my disappointment, and say that it must be hard to bear after giving so much care and attention to the construction of the catamaran ; but the thing has rendered me a good service, which other people cannot be expected to understand as I do. It has taken me out of every-day habits, made me see fresh scenes and people, and renewed some of the fancies and sensations of long

*The extreme limit of precautions against leakage was reached in the construction of the captive balloon in Paris (1878). It was seven-fold-1, strong muslin; 2, india-rubber; 3, very strong canvas; 4, india-rubber again; 5, canvas again; 6, vulcanized india-rubber; 7, varnished muslin.

All

these layers were glued together with india-rubber solution. When finished, the balloon was painted.

past youth. The art of being twenty-five years younger for a few days or weeks of holiday is really not a despicable art, however imperfect may be the means which it employs. Besides, we shall keep water out of the catamaran yet, and go with all sails set on the best sailing river in Europe. Cleverer constructors than we pretend to be have had their disappointments also, and on a larger scale. We have at least this consolation, that we have not ruined any confiding shareholders, and we positively discourage the idea of taking shares in the Narcissus.*

* In case this paper should fall into the hands of some nautical critic, I may say that the real causes of the leakage could not be explained properly without technical writing and diagrams, and that they

Narcissus, did I say? The name of the thing is changed-yea, even to Hylas, who of yore, as legends tell, was drawn down by the water-nymphs

"Unto the depths where they were wont to dwell.” P. G. HAMERTON.

resulted from the construction of the boat in sections, and the fastenings used to put these sections together. Of course, each section was made of independent compartments, but the swelling of the wood in water sufficiently displaced certain fittings to produce narrow openings in which the blade of a pen-knife might be introduced, and through which the water entered rapidly the india-rubbered canvas was to have provided against this possibility. The difficulty has been overcome since the account of the voyage was written, and overcome without sacrificing in any way the convenience or portability of the catamaran.

HORRIBLE dens, Sir, aren't they? This is one of my daily rounds. It's here, in these awful places,

That child-life most abounds. We ferret from roof to basement In search of our tiny prey; We're down on their homes directly If they happen to stop away.

Knock at the door! Pooh, nonsense!
They wouldn't know what it meant.
Come in and look about you;

They'll think you're a School Board gent. Did ever you see such hovels?

Dirty, and damp, and small.
Look at the rotten flooring,
Look at the filthy wall.

That's lucky-the place is empty,
The whole of the family's out.
This is one of my fav'rite cases:
Just give a glance about.

There's a father and four young children,
And Sally the eldest's eight;
They're horribly poor-half-starving—
And they live in a shocking state.

The father gets drunk and beats them,
The mother she died last year :
There's a story about her dying
I fancy you'd like to hear.
She was one of our backward pupils,
Was Sally, the eldest child-
A poor little London blossom
The alley had not defiled.

She was on at the Lane last winter-
She played in the Pantomime;
A lot of our School Board children
Get on at the Christmas time.
She was one of a group of fairies,

And her wand was the wand up there— There, in the filthy corner

Behind the broken chair.

The gilt of the star has faded,
And the tinsel's peeled away;
But once, in the glaring lime-light,
It gleamed like a jewelled spray.
A fairy's wand in a lodging

In a slum like this looks queer;
But you'll guess why they let her keep it,
When you know how the wand came here.

Of course the hand-organ is a nuisance, and the organ-grinder and his monkey are extremely objectionable. Still, we should remember that the organ-grinder is an ignorant man, whose blood has been tainted with organs and monkeys through a long series of grinding ancestors, and who has probably never in his whole life been taught the distinction between virtue and organgrinding. Moreover, bad as the Savoyard organ-grinder is, he is sometimes capable of noble actions. There is a play called the "Pearl of Savoy," in which that clever actress, Miss Maggie Mitchell, used to personate a Savoyard girl who had wandered away to Paris, and, in consequence of the wickedness of a Parisian lover, had become insane. An organ-grinder from her native village discovered her, and lured her back to Savoy by walking backwards about ten feet in advance of her, and grinding his organ. In the last act the curtain rises on this good grinder as he is carefully descending the Alps-which are fully twelve feet high-and coaxing the "Pearl" to follow him into the peaceful valley. He has walked backward all the way from Paris for the sake of saving an utterly useless girl! When the organ-grinder is capable of such a feat as this, who will deny that he has his redeeming points?

Why austere moralists should strain at the hand-organ of the streets, and totally forget the domestic music within their own doors, is something quite inexplicable. In the United States the prevalence of singing and instrumental music in the family is simply frightful. Whether we look upon it as a vice or a dream it presents a terrible spectacle, and without doubt it is steadily and rapidly destroying the very foundations of government, and spreading social and domestic anarchy through the whole extent of the Republic.

In the early part of the present century, when political corruption was almost unknown, and men lived virtuous and useful lives, domestic music can hardly be said to have existed. In the large cities there Icould have been met an occasional and shameless man who was known to be addicted to the degrading practice of playing the accordion, and at intervals a dissolute

college student would be caught in the act of playing the flute and promptly expelled, but the family was wonderfully free from music of all kinds. Young women frequently sang in the choir of some church or chapel, but they never dreamed of singing in their pure and peaceful homes. The piano, and that common and more disgusting instrument the melodion, could not be found in a single reputable New England household, and had any New England man ventured to play a brass instrument he would have been taught with the help of tar and feathers that he lived in a free and law-abiding country.

How sharp and painful is the contrast between the America of to-day and the America of eighty years ago. The piano has penetrated into every household. Our young women and our young men sing songs, and our middle-aged men play on cornets and trombones. In many families the squeak of the melodion is heard on every Sunday night, and in hundreds of rural villages the evening air is profaned by the sound of the banjo. We have become a musical people, and even the most ardent and reckless patriot must admit the disgraceful fact.

To good music, properly played or sung, no intelligent person makes any objection. It is the music that is furnished by amateurs that calls for stern reprobation. When a woman who has a good voice, and the capacity to learn to use it, has spent long years of constant labour in learning to sing, there is no reason why we should not pay her to sing for us, but there is every reason why we should be spared the singing of the amateur who has either no voice or no knowledge of how to use it. Nevertheless, the American girl, instead of being carefully guarded by her parents and friends from the contaminating influence of music, is permitted to sing or to play the piano while she is yet a mere child, and the evil habit thus early formed grows stronger as she grows older. It is not only the daughters of the rich who are thus led astray, but the piano and the melodion have found their way into the humblest homes. Only the other day a lady told me that she had sent for a young coloured woman to temporarily take the

place of her cook, and was told that the young person could not come for the reason that she must stay at home to practise her piano lesson. Alike from the Presidential mansion and the cabin of the emancipated slave the sound of the piano disturbs the once peaceful atmosphere of the Republic. Was it for this that we fought the War of Independence and crushed the Southern Rebellion?

Our boys grow up comparatively free from music until they enter college. There they are speedily corrupted by the example of bad companions, and learn to sing. What are called college songs are probably the most loathsome form of musical vice. They are, however, immensely popular, and at all our summer watering-place hotels students can be heard at all hours of the night singing what the ladies call "those delightful college songs." What these songs are may be imagined from the following specimen of one of the most popular of them. The chorus, which on the whole is less idiotic than the rest of it, runs thus :—

Shool, shool, shool-i-rool.
Shool-i-shagarack, shool-i-barbacool.

This is the sort of thing that the youth of America sings at the oldest and best colleges. What can we hope for the future of the country where the young men can sing such a song without even a blush of shame?

Next to college songs, those masterpieces of vulgarity and idiocy, the sham negro melodies must be ranked. They are sung not merely by young men, but by middleaged fathers and mothers. Respectable people will gravely stand up in a drawingroom, and, addressing their associates as niggahs," will inform them that "dis heart grows weary," and that it is "turnin ebber" toward the Swanee river, or other mythical and ridiculous place. It is a spectacle that might well cause any but a deaf angel to shed tears of pity, and yet it is a common everyday spectacle in our unhappy country.

Of late years the depraved instincts of hundreds of middle-aged men have manifested themselves in a tendency to play bass instruments. The success of a certain English cornet-player, who has played in concerts in all our chief cities, doubtless gave the first impulse to this new form of vice, which has spread with fearful rapidity. Although the cornet is the instrument most commonly selected, there are men who have sunk to the deep depravity of the trombone, and I recently heard of an old man of

seventy, who, while fairly tottering on the verge of the grave, has begun to take lessons on the French horn, and daily practises the scale as if there were no future world. While it is chiefly among middle-aged men who fancy themselves too old to learn the piano that this plague of bass has manifested itself, their example has perverted the young to no inconsiderable extent, and boys of twelve and fourteen can now be heard producing those strangling moans by which the student of the cornet may be recognized. It is difficult to characterize with proper reprobation this detestable form of domestic music. Its prevalence shows us that we have reached what is probably the last step in the downward part of musical corrupters.

We thus see by this rapid survey that domestic music, in one or another form, has completely honeycombed American society. Neither sex nor age has presented any successful resistance to it. We have become

a nation of amateur musicians, and the din of strings, the blare of brass, and the shrill pipe of the human throat ascend from us to the astonished skies. The evils resulting from this state of things are wide and far reaching, but a fatal blindness seems to have fallen upon the people, and our ablest men, while wasting their time in discussing questions of finance and politics, do not perceive the danger that is so near and threatening.

If

The most obvious effect of domestic music upon the community is to destroy all reverence for the truth, and to promote universal hypocrisy and mendacity. The time has long since gone by when an honest man could safely make an evening call. you enter a drawing-room, the fatal piano is always open, and the eldest daughter awaits your request that she would sing, after which common decency requires you to ask her sister to play. If with stern resolution you forbear to voluntarily bring domestic music about your ears, the mother or father calls on the girls to display their accomplishments. When the painful rites are ended you must admire the voice of the singer, and marvel at the beautiful execution of the player. No matter for your conscience; no matter for your love of veracity and hatred of falsehood; you must either put your conscience in your pocket and become a hypocrite, or you must fatally offend your friends. This is what every man in an American town is required to do with appalling frequency. The inevitable result is that he loses all regard for truth. After having lied persistently and steadily