not used to play before people, but only to "shun melancholy." Then she sat down upon a low cushion, and honest Sir James, according to the custom of the time, fell upon his knees before her. The Queen, with a truly feminine spirit, inquired whether he thought she or Mary Queen of Scots played the best. Sir James said that his sovereign played "reasonably, for a queen." This answer would not serve to-day, as the Queen of England is one of the most perfect of amateur musicians.

ITALIAN SPINET, ORNAMENTED WITH PRECIOUS STONES.

The virginal and spinet belong to the same period. From them, as need of a more elaborate performance grew, we have the harpsichord. A very fine harpsichord looked something like a grand piano, but it had two rows of keys, one upper and one lower. I shall not here go into a description of the harpsichord. It is only needful to say that it was the outgrowth of clavichord and virginal and spinet, and had some of the defects as well as the good points of all three.

HANDEL'S FAVORITE HARPISCHORD.

Our great-grandmothers played upon harpsichords. They were tinkling little affairs, yet I fancy that Mozart's and Haydn's music must have sounded very quaint and pleasing upon them. Where have they all vanished to, I wonder?—along with the flowery brocaded gowns, the slender fans, the powder and patches and paint, of that dear old time?

In an old house I once visited, a harpsichord of seventeen hundred and something used to stand neglected and disused in an upper hall. Sometimes we children thrummed waltzes upon it; sometimes I remember our getting out a faded old music-book with the picture of a shepherdess on it, and picking out the funny little songs that were printed there a hundred years ago. On the fly-leaf of the book was written in a very flourishy hand, "To Isabel, from J——." Who was Isabel, and who was J., we used to wonder.

I can fancy that the music she played to please her mamma and papa, and perhaps her uncles and aunts, was of a very primitive order, for when harpsichords were used, young ladies were not at all proficient. Music was then considered a "genteel" sort of accomplishment, and good masters were very rare, and never tried to make their pupils do more than strike the notes correctly and in good "dum-dum" sort of time. Consider our advantages now, and yet I fancy those young people of "Isabel's" day valued their musical instruction much more than we do ours.

PIANO OF ABOUT 1777.

Well, then, from this pretty, picturesque harpsichord period, we find ourselves by slow degrees in that of the piano, and I suppose the first thing you will wish to know is how a piano-forte differs from these other instruments of which I have been writing. The principal difference is that the strings are struck with a hammer. About the beginning of the eighteenth century this idea had originated with three men at once—an Italian named Cristofali, a Frenchman named Marius, and a German named Schröter; but all investigators seem convinced that Cristofali was the real originator. His ideas were the best. So, later in the century, when harpsichords began to be thought incomplete, different makers tried to produce something better, and the result was the primitive piano-forte.

At this time the composer Sebastian Bach was in Berlin. Frederick the Great was eager to hear him play, and as that famous sovereign possessed several of the new piano-fortes (or forte-pianos, as they then were called), Bach came one evening to the palace, where a crowd of gay ladies and gentlemen were assembled.

The composer had to go from room to room, trying first one of the new pianos, then another. These instruments were manufactured in Germany, but, later, English and French pianos took the palm, and about the beginning of this century American ladies were growing proficient in the art of piano-playing—proficient at least for that day. Have you not all seen your grandmammas' music-books, in which "The Battle of Prague" is an honored "piece"? True, there were hundreds of nobler works, but only public performers seem to have attempted them.

As time went on, and the interest in the instrument grew, the mechanism of the piano-forte was improved, and at this date (1881), it is considered perfect. Here and there as you play, as you listen to the sounds of the little hammer falling on the strings, let your thoughts wander back to Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth of England, with their virginals and spinets—indeed, farther into the' realm of poetic, dreamy sound, for beyond these were clavicytheriums, citoles and citherns, dulcimers and psalteries, and in the East, among the people whom we see now in sculpture, a whole line of lyres and harps and lutes.

It may not seem that so far away as early Egyptian days was the first idea of our piano, yet certainly such is the case. In some far Eastern country you might see, graven in stone of centuries gone by, a figure holding an instrument dimly shadowing that on which you now may play all written music.

PERILS AND PRIVATIONS.

BY JAMES PAYN.

THE WRECK OF THE "GROSVENOR."—(Continued.)

The wanderers still occasionally came across the natives. Once, on arriving at a village, they obtained a young bullock in exchange for buttons, a few of which the savages had left on their coats; and that the distribution of this godsend might be equal, the whole was cut in pieces, and, just as I have seen done with a cake at school, one of the party, standing with his back to it, named the person who should have the piece held up. But generally the natives denied them everything. Once they strove to barter some poor relic of their property for a calf, which the others appeared to agree to, "but no sooner had they got the price than the calf was driven away."

On one occasion only did they exhibit the slightest pity. On the party coming upon another dead whale, a band of natives surrounded them, but on perceiving their sad condition, and that there was really nothing more to steal, they forbore to molest them, and one of them even lent his lance, with which some chunks of blubber were cut out.

A little afterward they found two planks on a sandy bank, in each of which was a nail. "Elated," as we are told, "with this valuable discovery," they set fire to the planks, and getting out the nails, "flattened them between two stones into something like knives." A few yards further on, by turning up the sand, they found water, of which they had been much in want; and here, with much thankfulness, they rested. This was the last day of what seemed to these poor souls good fortune.

They did indeed fall in with a dead shark, but it was in such an advanced stage of decay that "the liver only could be eaten." Nay, driven by the extremity of hunger, the carpenter ate of some deadly berries, and was poisoned. Now this man it was who from the first, until the hour of his death, had taken care of the little boy; who had striven to relieve those fatigues which his tender limbs could so little endure; "who had heard his complaints with pity; who had fed him when he could obtain wherewithal to do it," and who had lulled his weary little body to rest.

No human work more commends itself to our admiration than that of this poor carpenter, who reminds us, indeed, of the Carpenter's Son with his "Suffer little