"Since my coming up I have entered with Mr. Hackett to improve my Dancing, and hope to make such Progress therein as may answer to the Expense, and enable me to appear well in any Public Company. The great Desire I have of pleasing you will make me the more Assiduous in my undertaking, and I arrive at any degree of Perfection it must be Attributed to the Liberal Education you bestow on me. "I am with greatest Respect, Dear Pappa, "Yr dutiful Daughter, "MARY GRAFTON. "RCHD GRAFTON, ESQ., New Castle, Delaware." We have much contemporary evidence to show that music, as a formulated study, was rarely taught till after the Revolution. But there never was a time in colonial life when music was not loved and clung to with a sentiment that is difficult of explanation, but must not be underrated. Dr. John Earle gives in his _Microcosmographie_, the character of a Puritan woman, or a "shee-precise Hypocrite," saying "shee suffers not her daughters to learne on the Virginalls, because of their affinity with the Organs," yet I find Judge Sewall, a true Puritan, taking his wife's virginals to be repaired. I supposed she played psalm tunes on them. Spinets and harpsichords were brought to wealthy citizens. Copies of old-time music show how very elementary were the performances on these instruments. Listeners were profoundly moved at the sound, but it would seem far from inspiring to-day. "The notes of slender harpsichords with tapping, twinkling quills, Or carrolling to a spinet with its thin, metallic thrills." [Illustration: Elizabeth Quincy Wendell, 1720 _circa_] Even the "new Clementi with glittering keys" gave but a tinny sound. Girls "raised a tune," however, to these far from resonant accompaniments, and sung their ballads and sentimental ditties, unhampered by thoughts of technique and methods and schools. Many of these old musical instruments are still in existence. The harpsichord bought for "little Miss Custis" is in its rightful home at Mount Vernon. By Revolutionary times, girls' boarding schools had sprung into existence in large towns, and certainly filled a great want. One New England school, haloed with romance, was kept by Mrs. Susanna Rawson, who was an actress, the daughter of an English officer, and married to a musician. She was also a play-writer and wrote one novel of great popularity, _Charlotte Temple_. Eliza Southgate Bowne gives some glimpses of the life at this school in her letters. She was fourteen years when she thus wrote to her father:-- "HON. FATHER: