"They told me, sir," he said, "of your promotion.
I am very glad of it. It requires peculiar
gifts to govern. If you were thinking—as they
told me you were—of taking with you any man
of a peculiar turn that way, as secretary, or that
sort of thing, I confess I should be very glad
to go. You can understand that a man, who
feels himself made for better things, and with
ambition, must find himself rather thrown away
in this sort of thing;" and he glanced round the
room.

"O, of course," said the diplomatist: "quite
so. And so you find this place dull? It seems
to me pleasant enough. Do they ever give a
ball or a dinner, eh?"

"O, I suppose so," said Fermor, carelessly.
"I don't know, really. I am the worst person
in the world to apply to. Of course, if you
have chosen any one already, that is a different
thing. But I think I could be of use; in fact,
I am sure of it. Better, perhaps, than any one
else."

"Ah, quite so," said the other; "no doubt.
And the men here, how do you find them, now?
Pleasant, I should say, for mere daily use—like
roast leg of mutton, not a refined dish, but we
have to come back to it."

"But have you made up your mind, sir," said
Fermor, keeping to his point, "if I might ask
directly?"

"Do you know," said Sir Hopkins, turning
round on him, "you remind me of the old chief
who was our stiffest card in the Waipiti. All our
diplomatic forms were thrown away on him. My
dear Charles, we will talk of this to-morrow."

Fermor, fretting at this cool reception of his
proposals, which he always liked to be as
promptly received as they were offered, said,
ironically, "You have to make their acquaintance
as yet, sir."

"No, no," said the diplomatist, smiling. "I
have read a good many more men than I have
books. For instance, that sunburnt man opposite,
who made that comic remark about the
halter of a horse."

Fermor smiled with compassion. "He never
gets out of a circle much larger than a halter,"
he said. "Showers is his name. He is our
professional jester!"

"Showers? Showers? I knew a Colonel
Showers who commanded out in the islands,
and headed the attack on the Pah."

"My uncle, sir," said Showers; "he was out
there many years."

"Good gracious!" said the diplomatist, drawing
his chair over to him, "how curious, how
wonderful! He was my great friend, often dined
with me at Government House. How is he?
Heard from him?"

The diplomatist was so delighted at this
discovery, that he addicted himself to Showers for
the rest of the night. Showers, elated by the
proud distinction, grew, as it were, rampant
in his ardour, and threw out on all sides his
Fecinine jests, as they would be called in the
old Roman History, being reckless enough,
even, to level a shaft or two at the Fermor
Jove. But the face of the Fermor Jove wore
an expression of deep pain and disgust, as he
saw this strange preference. Later, something
like this thought passed through his mind:
"That the destinies of thousands of our fellow-
creatures should be committed to a man who
was so ignorant in reading the human mind!
Surprising blindness! It made him sad."

Late that night they set out to walk home
together. Major Carter and Fermor, with the
diplomatist in the middle. At Fermor's gate
they said good night, and Fermor went in. But
he heard Sir Hopkins say in his cheeriest
diapason, "My dear Carter, give me your arm!
Which way do you go? I want to have a talk
with you over old times."

OLD, NEW, AND NO MUSIC.
IN TWO CHAPTERS.

CHAPTER II. AN ENGLISH FESTIVAL.

A RETROSPECT of what England has done
without—what has been effected here in
cultivation and enjoyment of music during thirty
years past, offered as a companion sketch to a
late glance at Germany—makes up a record as
odd and as full of contradictions as can well be
imagined. If in one or two provinces of the
art we have made, as shall be shown, a progress
which places us at the head of European
nations, in others we have obstinately stood still
—or, what is even less hopeful, have gone round
and round in a narrow vicious circle, till all
clearness of discernment has been lost.

To begin with our short-comings. The
collection of these, at once depressing yet droll,
which the story of so-called national opera
during the last thirty years must register, would
be large enough to fill three volumes post octavo.
Thirty years ago, it might have been fancied
that we were at the end of a transition period.
We had just buried Arne's Artaxerxes, with its
Fly soft Ideas, fly, and In Infancy, and Water
parted from the Sea, and The Soldier Tired, and
the wonderfully appropriate and sensible quartet,
Mild as the Moonbeams, poked in by Braham.—
That was England's one classical opera which
kept the stage;—and in which Miss Paton, the
last of the Mandanes, was by patriotic faith
held to be quite as great a singer as Catalani.
We had done too, and seemingly for ever, with
the ballad operas of Linley, and Shield, and
Dibdin, and Arnold, and Hook, and Kelly, and
Mazzinghi, and Reeve—spoken dramas full of
pretty artless melodies, the like of which are
not to-day to be procured for love or money,
into the midst of which, every now and then,
some pirated Italian bravura or concerted piece
by Galuppi, or Piccini, or Cimarosa, or Paiesiello,
figured, with a coherence little short of sublimity.
Comical, indeed, were those domestic operas,
with their benevolent farmer-fathers, and their
rustic heroines who ranged the fields (as Boyce's
duet from Solomon hath it) in satin shoes, and
who, when weary of gleaning, thought nothing of
calling for a harp into the middle of a harvest-