It is the only fault of the peruke-maker Meuseler, that he loves to sing too well, and is too fond of intruding his natural pipes into all church-music that is made in his perukial diocese, especially on Holy Whitsuntide. The St. Luna chorister could never bear this; but how to cheat him and feast a thousand ears? Simply thus: He frizzled out to-day what was still to be frizzled, (not to-day alone, but it was always so,) and merely glided up the choir-steps. Here he leaned and watched, till the chorister, seated on the musical sausage-sledge, struck with his finger the first note of the church-music. Then, like a sunbeam, he darted up into the choir, and filched away from the young counter-tenor his part, and sang it into the ears of the congregation, but with much whining and puffing, as if he were chanting his manuscript to the reviewers. For one must now, once for all, make it known to the world, that the enraged musician at the clavichord had, with a sharp-cornered triangle of elbows, furiously thrust back at the frizzling counter-tenor, in order to push the strange singing-bird out of the bird-house of the choir. But as the singer made his right arm the firm note-desk of his text, and the other a war-club,--like the Jews, who built up Jerusalem with one hand full of building-tools and the other full of weapons,--one sees that the peruke-maker, even amidst this continuance of fighting and fa-sol-la-ing, could do his very best, and execute somewhat during the musical truce of God. But so soon as the music had drawn its last breath, then the harmonious bird-of-passage and stormy-petrel skipped nimbly out across the choir, accompanied by the memory of a thousand ears and a single elbow. The chorister could not catch him, nor get scent of him. If, on the contrary, he had the good fortune to be passing with his bandboxes through a village just as parson and schoolmaster and pedagogic frog-spawn were quacking and croaking[220] round a deaf corpse,--all which many name, more concisely, a dirge,--then could the _virtuoso_, without the counter-prop of elbows, spring gayly with both feet into the motet,[221] work out the funeral serenade given to the dead man by his heirs, throw in gratis some final cadences to the funeral procession, and yet have time to offer in the village to the bailiff an entirely new bag-wig.-- To our hero the music in country churches gave the greatest satirical pleasure. But little should we get by it, had I not the forethought to beg leave just for one poor little extra-syllable--one shall hardly see it--upon church-music. POOR LITTLE EXTRA-SYLLABLE ON CHURCH-MUSIC.