The audience heard and saw, and the singers were not numbers to them but “our Annie”’ or “our Sam”’ or “our lot fra? Blackburn”’ and so on. Local feeling ran high under an affectation of cool discrimination and broke out in wild applause, intended to influence the judges’ verdict, coming, curiously localized, from parts of the hall where adherents had gathered together in the belief that union is strength. But they were, one and all, susceptible to fine shades of singing; they didn’t withhold applause from a fine rendering because the singers were of some other district than their own. Local patriotism was disciplined to their musical appreciations. Mr. Chown, of London, had ceased, as an annual visitor, to be surprised by this musical cockpit, where not money but taintless glory was the prize. They competed for the honor of their birthplaces, and for the privilege of holding a “challenge shield,” inscribed with the winners’ names, until the nest contest. He had ceased even to wonder at that drastic rule of an autocratic committee imposing evening dress upon the occupants of the front seats and at its phenomenal results. He was a worker in research, he was scientifically unemotional about the motive of his research, but he was on fertile ground here, and if he drew blank at Staithley Eisteddfod, then Lancashire was not the county he took it for. Yet his was not the point of view of Mr. Pate, and the capacity to sing was the least of the qualities for which he looked. To a sufficing extent, the capacity would be present in all of to-night’s competitors, even in those who sang only in chorus, and what Mr. Chown was looking for was best indicated by the algebraic symbol, X. He couldn’t, himself, have defined the quality he sought. The reflection of Mr. Montagu about the actor Tom Hall may be recalled. Tom Hall was a sound actor, lacking X. If there is a word for X, it is personality. Good locks went for something, and so did the evident possession of either sex but the whole of X depended neither upon good looks nor upon sex, and was a mystery of the stars whom Mr. Chown, with his trustworthy flair, discovered before they were stars. Technique could be acquired, and Mr. Chown did not condemn technique, but X _was_ and it was not possible to acquire it. Add X to technique and the result was a hundred pounds a week: technique without X was Tom Hall, “The Woman Who Paid” and the whisky of conscious failure in life. He sat down with a silent prayer that an X performer would appear on the platform and that he might not repeat his poignant disappointment of last year when he had found an unmistakable X only to learn that its possessor was a Wesleyan who looked upon a theater door as the main entrance to hell. “But you’re a great artist,” he had told her and “I’m a Christian woman,” she had replied and left him frustrate.