elevated desk, so as to sweep the whole room
with his vision, and his duty is to register in a
book the hours at which the manuscript arrives,
to apportion the labour of the subordinates, and
to look after the messengers. No sounds are
heard save the intermittent click of the handles
of the instruments and the shrill and tumultuous
rhythm of the bells. Should the fates be adverse,
however, the room is a scene of uproar,
perplexity, and excitement. The debate, perhaps,
has been very late, and piles of "copy" have
been poured in at a late hour; portions of the
manuscript are illegible; the messenger who
has the first speech in his pocket does not turn
up for an hour after the second messenger
with the second speech has arrived; three
pages of the most important part of the oration
of the evening are missing; messages are pouring
in from Glasgow that the compositors are
waiting. Swearing both loud and deep is
heard, porters hurry up and down the long flight
of stairs, the clerks work at their instruments
savagely. The sub-editors are in despair. They
furiously ask themselves why they were ever born,
and stigmatise telegraphs as an invention of the
nether pit. Bundles of manuscript in one hand,
evening newspapers in the other, blacklead
pencil behind the ear, a penknife in mouth,
they move about among the clerks, fretful and
heated, cutting down the "copy," adding
something here, taking away something there,
stopping one thing in mid-transit to send off another,
while the bells jangle and wrangle as if in
diabolical triumph.

Thus it goes on, until London wakes up
with the grey morning, when, unheedful of the
wonders they have been accomplishing, the pale
clerks crawl languidly homeward.

PHENOMENA OF MUSIC.

THE Marquis de Pontécoulant has published
a lecture* on The Influence of Sound on
Animated Beings, which, he holds, has been very
imperfectly studied. A few writers, indeed,
have recorded facts more or less extraordinary
in their nature, but none of them have
investigated the real causes of those facts. We
propose, first to notice some of M. de Pontécoulant's
"facts," which are both interesting and
admissible; and then to quote, if not discuss,
his causes—about which there may be two
opinions.

* Les Phénomènes de la Musique. Paris:
Librairie Internationale.

From Dr. Abercrombie, he cites the case of
Nancy: an uneducated orphan seven years of
age, employed by a farmer to keep his cows.
Nancy's bedroom was separated by a thin
partition from another chamber, frequently occupied
by a wandering fiddler who had considerable
powers of execution. As he sometimes spent a
great part of the night in practising difficult
passages, Nancy repeatedly complained that the
noise fatigued her: otherwise, she paid no
attention to the music.

After a time, Nancy fell ill. A charitable
lady, residing near the farm, took her home
and nursed her. On her recovery, which was
slow and tedious. Nancy remained in the service
of her benefactress.

Some months afterwards, during the night,
charming melodies were heard proceeding from
an unknown source. The mysterious music,
repeated at irregular intervals, excited the
curiosity of the inmates of the house. Not content
with listening, they tried to discover the invisible
minstrel, and traced the sounds to Nancy's
room. She was in a gentle slumber, and from
her lips there issued a succession of notes
resembling the tones of a violin.

It appears that at the epoch of her musical
crises Nancy, once in bed, remained completely
motionless. For an instant she mumbled indistinctly,
and then uttered sounds like the tuning
of a fiddle. A moment's silence would be
speedily broken by a prelude performed with the
lips quite closed. Then she attacked passages
of great difficulty, always with her mouth shut,
executing them with the precision of a consummate
artist. Sometimes she stopped short
abruptly, and repeated the sounds of tuning the
instrument. Then, taking up the piece exactly
where she had left off, she finished the performance
as correctly as she had begun it. Two
years afterwards, a pianist was equally able to
call forth Nancy's imitative powers.

After this musical milkmaid, let us take a
musical dog. At the beginning of the Bourbon
Restoration, a wretched-looking cur attended
the daily parade at the Tuileries. He forced
his way among the musicians, defiled with
them, and halted with them. The parade over,
he disappeared until next day. The band
appropriately named him "Tout- laid,"
"Thoroughly ugly," which did not prevent his
becoming a general favourite. A subscription was
got up to buy him a collar with his name engraven
thereon. He was entertained by the musicians,
each in his turn. His host for the day
simply said, "Tout-laid, you will come and dine
with me," and the invitation was at once
accepted.

The repast at an end, Tout-laid took his
leave, hurried off to the opera, found his way
into the orchestra, and remained stuck up in a
corner until the performance was over. What he
did afterwards, nobody knew. The mystery
enveloping that portion of his existence was
never dispelled. But, one morning, Tout-laid
failed to appear at the review, and his usual place
at the opera was empty. The fourth day of his
disappearance, the regimental band was stopped
in its march by a funeral, which was unattended
by a single human mourner, the only follower
being an ill-favoured mongrel—Tout-laid himself!
They whistled and shouted all in vain.
Deaf to their calls, and giving no sign of recognition,
he doggedly followed the bier. Next
morning the sexton found him lying dead in a
hole which he had scratched on the common