Now my predecessor had provided a costly harmonium, of the best procurable quality. I had to consider this. I considered, moreover, the agonies I had endured as a boy from the performance of a west gallery orchestra; so I declined to entertain the project. Next Sunday was windy. There was in the church a stove, and to the stove-pipe outside a cowl. In the wind the cowl twisted and groaned. Afterwards I learned from a superior farmer's wife, that, having heard of the purpose of the deputation to call on me, at the first groan of the cowl her blood ran cold; with horror in all her nerves she thought--"He has given way. Here is the orchestra tuning up!" I regret, however, that I did not yield, for I believe now that no old institution should be abolished that is capable of improvement. It is quite true that the performances were torturing to the ear that was educated, nevertheless they were the best that the village musicians could produce, and therefore ought not to have been rejected. There was in them an element of life, they were capable of improvement, and they were homegrown. The harmonium was a new instrument, it had to be played by the schoolmistress, an importation; and, after all, a harmonium is an odious instrument, only a degree better than the old village orchestra. But I think that it was not merely the painfulness of the performances of the old orchestra that caused their abolition. I am sure that many a parson would have gone on enduring, having his ears tortured and his teeth set on edge, had it not been for the discords in the instrumentalists, as well as in the instruments. The quarrels in the west gallery were proverbial. Strikes had begun there long before they began in factories and coal-mines. Sometimes the strikes were against the parson, if he interfered with the orchestra for intemperate proceedings--leaving bottles of ale and spirits, or rather leaving bottles that had contained these liquors--in the gallery after practice night. Sometimes the strikes were against the conductor, or the first violin, and I have a recollection of one of the strikes being an emphatic one, when the fiddle-stick performed its part on the head of the flute, and the flute on the head of the fiddle. There was a dear old rector I remember, who said once: "I never can be brought to believe that there will be music in heaven, for if there be music there, there must be choirs and orchestra; and if choirs and orchestra, then there can be no harmony." The bickerings, the heart-burnings, in the west gallery were a constant source of trouble to the parson, and if he seized on a means of establishing peace by abolishing the orchestra, he was not altogether to blame. The first stage in getting rid of the village orchestra was taken by the introduction of the barrel-organ. I can well recall that stage.