It was the misfortune of Apollos to be born with an ear—I mean an ear for music! Whether the euphonious name by which he was christened had any thing to do with the quaverings of his innocent cradle-_dom_ I cannot say, but certain it is, his infantine warblings were loud and incessant—“_prestissimo_” and “_fortissimo_,” seldom allowing a “rest” either to himself or his poor worn-out mother. The period of infancy passed, Apollos was sent to school, where he was distinguished for the long drawn nasal tones in which he might be said to chant his lessons, and being moreover somewhat given to whistling and tuning up of jews-harps, the terrible ire of Schoolmaster Ferule vented itself in drawing long scales upon his tender flesh, to which Apollos composed the notes upon a high key. As soon as he could read the tenth chapter of Nehemiah without drawing a long breath, his father made him ruler over countless heads of cattle, and set him to ploughing and planting, sowing and reaping the fertile acres which were one day to become his own. Even into the drudgery of the farm Apollos bore with him his musical mania, and while he sowed the seed and planted the corn it was all done to music, so that when the green grain burst through the ground there was no stiff regularity about it, but falling off into minims, crotchets, quavers and demi-semi-quavers, it swept through the broad fields like a living sheet of music, from which no doubt the little ground-sparrow and the glassy-winged grasshopper, learned many new variations. Not “blest as the gods,” Apollos could strike no harp but the jews-harp, for his father had no music in his soul, though a very clever man, Shakspeare to the contrary, and would never allow his son to spend his earnings in cultivating so useless an art. The singing-school he tolerated, and there, in the long winter evenings, by the flickering light of tallow candles did Apollos luxuriate—also at all trainings, when “the spirit-stirring drum and ear-piercing fife” echoed through the streets, there was the tall, ungainly figure of Apollos to be seen, almost envying even the little fat drummer the powers of his _rub-a-dub_. One day our musical hero purchased a cracked flute! How trilled his heart in joyful cadence as he held in his hand the precious bargain—with what ecstasy did he turn it over and over, and then, as soon as the cattle were foddered, and the shades of evening resting over the farm, he would nightly retire into the recesses of the forest, and there blow and puff, like Sam Weller’s “aggrawated glass-blower,” until his eyes almost started from their sockets—the rocks and trees to be sure kept their places in the firm earth, but the whip-po-wils and the owls peeped forth to listen, and more than once did he hear his notes re-echoed by some young, aspiring screech-owl.