It is no doubt perfectly true that Scotch music is by no means the highest development of that delightful art. It is but the outcome of natural feeling in a simple age and among an unsophisticated people; yet it does not by any means afford a good or safe medium for the beginner or the bungler to display to advantage his slender skill, while proficients in operatic music will find little opportunity to display their vocal feats, and it is quite probable that they may not be able to render it at all. It has an accent of its own which is not expressed in the musical notation, and is beyond the reach of any but a native, and attained but by few of them. Mary Brown's musical opportunities had not been great, but she had a full pure voice, always in perfect tune, and she had been accustomed to hear and to sing Scotch ballads all her life, and she entered into their spirit. Before she had sung two verses, the General's drooping head had steadied itself, he had risen to his feet, joined the group by the piano, and was beating time with his eye-glass to the quaint old measure. Lady Caroline too had risen, a most unusual exertion for her to make after dinner, and was standing with the rest. In this highly cultured age, we are all most learnedly musical. Beethoven, Bach, Spohr, we pay guineas to hear their works rendered, and are immensely pleased of course; though perhaps there are more of us than the one of whom it is recorded, who could very well mistake the tuning of the fiddles for the choicest morceau of the evening, and who certainly prefer the grand finale to all the rest. But the effect of a well-sung Scotch song on a roomful of Scotch people is something markedly different from the conventional and sometimes fictitious enjoyment of high music. Like the spiders which issued from the crannies of his cell when the Bastile prisoner touched his lute, so the inherent nature of the Scot will out and show itself at the sound of the national music, the dullest eye brightens and the heaviest foot would join the strathspey. It is in the blood. The artificial and conventional culture is scarce fifty years old, while the individual and peculiar nationality, of which our music is the voice, has come down in the blood through twenty generations, from before Bannockburn and the wars of independence, and is still present behind the whitewash of cosmopolitan pretence. Lady Caroline wiped her eyes under the rendering of Bessie Bell and Mary Gray's sad fate, and declared it reminded her of the old nursery at Pitthevlis, when she was a child. The General (who would have thought it?) was most interested by the woes of true love; and the 'Mill dams of Binnorie' and 'Barbara Allan' made him tug his moustache very hard. The strangers each had his special favourite, and Mary knew them all; then at length she was permitted to rise from the piano, and she did so amid an ovation of thanks. Julia's plan to belittle her had not succeeded.