This morning I received a polite invitation from Govenor Bowen in the name of a large company to join them in a Turtle Frolic about six miles out of town. Mr Hitchcock and other clergymen of the town were of the party but much against my inclination I was obliged to excuse myself. The traveller who drives through the by-roads of New England to-day is almost ready to assert that there is no dwelling too poor or too lonely to contain a piano, or at the very least a melodeon or parlor organ. The sounds of Czerny’s exercises issue from every farmhouse. There may be no new farm implements, no sewing-machine, but there will surely be a piano. This love of music has ever existed on those rock-bound shores, though in early days it found a stunted and sad expression in hymn tunes only, and the performance of music could scarce be called a colonial accomplishment. The first musical instruments were martial, drums and fifes and hautboys. I have never seen, in any personal inventory, the notice of a “gitterne” as in similar Virginian lists. But in the early years of the eighteenth century a few spinets must have been exported to Boston and Philadelphia, and perhaps to Virginia. In 1712 an advertisement was placed in the _Boston News-Letter_ that the Spinet would be taught, and on April 23, 1716, appeared in the same paper:-- Note that any Persons may have all Instruments of Music mended or Virginalls or Spinnets Strung & Tun’d, at a Reasonable Rate & likewise may be taught to play on any of the Instruments above mentioned. In August, 1740, a “Good Spinnet” was offered for sale, and soon after a second-hand “Spinnet,” and in January, 1750, “Spinnet wire.” On September 18, 1769, this notice appeared in the _Boston Gazette and Country Journal_:-- It is with pleasure that we inform the Public that a few days since was ship’d for Newport a very Curious Spinnet being the first ever made in America, the performance of the ingenious Mr. John Harris of Boston (son of the late Mr. Jos. Harris of London, Harpsichord and Spinnet Maker deceased) and in every respect does honor to that Artist who now carries on the Business at his house a few doors Northward of Dr. Clarkes, North End of Boston. This first American spinet is said to be still in existence in a house in Newport on the corner of Thames and Gidley streets. It has one set of jacks and strings. The hammers have crow-quills which press on brass strings. It has ancient neighbors. In Bristol, R. I., is a triangular spinet four feet long, which is more than a century older than the town which is now its home. It bears this maker’s mark,--“Johann Hitchcock fecit London 1520.” If this date is correct, it is the oldest spinet known, the one of Italian manufacture in the British Museum being dated 1521.