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it which bred the immediate conviction that indolence and averseness to systematic application were all that lay between “Mop” and the career of a second Paganini.

While playing he invariably closed his eyes ; using no notes, and, as it were, allowing the violin to wander on at will into the most plaintive passages ever heard by rustic man. There was a certain lingual character in the supplicatory expressions he produced, which would wellnigh have drawn an ache from the heart of a gate-post, He could make any child in the parish, who was at all sensitive to music, burst into tears in a few minutes by simply fiddling one of the old dance-tunes he almost entirely affected—country jigs, reels, and “Favorite Quick-Steps” of the last century — some mutilated remains of which even now reappear as nameless phantoms in new quadrilles and gallops, where they are recognized only by the curions, or by such old-fashioned and far-between people as have been thrown with men like Wat Ollamoor in their early life.

His date was a little later than that of the old Mellstock choir-band, which comprised the Dewys, Mail, and the rest—in fact, he did not rise above the horizon thereabout till those well-known musicians were disbanded as ecclesiastical functionaries. In their honest love of thoroughness they despised the new man’s style. Theophilas Dewy (Reuben the tranter’s younger brother) used to say there was no “ plumness” in it—no bowing, no solidity—it was all fantastical, And probably this was true. Anyhow, Mop had, very obviously, never bowed a note of church-music from his birth ; he never once sat in the gallery of Mellstock church, where the others had tuned their venerable psalmody so many hundreds of times; had never, in all likelihood, entered a church at all, All