The executants follow one another with a rapidity that is bewildering. I have sometimes witnessed prodigious feats at these private concerts. I have heard as many as twenty-five songs in less than two hours, and when I thought of the number of little black dots on all those pages that had been turned over, and of the seeming inability of the performers to hit one of them right, I have said to myself: "It is really too unlucky; never was there anything so perverse. It is wonderful when one comes to take into consideration the theory of chances." "_Concert_," says Littré, "is _action d'agir ensemble_." Not so in England at musical parties: rather _the act of running after one another without being able to catch one another_. These good folks in their duets always seem to me to be singing vigorously at each other: "You can't catch me, you can't catch me!" The piano is generally good, I mean the instrument; although the French piano has more sonority, and certainly more limpidity. "_Nos pianos sont un peu sourds_," said an amiable hostess to me one day in French. "They are lucky," thought I. The best thing to be done, when you find yourself in for an evening's music of this kind, is to put a good face upon it, and keep quiet. After all it is but an affair of ear scratches. One survives it. I was ill-inspired enough one evening to move out of my corner. I had been in torture for about two hours. "Come, old fellow," I said to myself, "this will never do: you must rouse yourself and move about a little, you are getting tipsy listening to this noise." A young man, with a coppery, metallic voice, had just completed the massacre of that beautiful song of Tito Mattel's "_Non è ver_." The execution over, I rose, thinking the moment favourable, and advancing to where the singer stood, I said to him, "What a lovely song that is, to be sure! and how exquisitely you sing it." ----"It is my favourite," he said to me, with a triumphant glance. ----"You sing it with such taste too. Do you know it in Italian?" ----"Sir! But I have just sung it in Italian." ----"Really? I beg your pardon, I was so much under the influence of the melody that I was not listening to the words." "I am not in luck to-night decidedly," I said to myself as I returned to my seat, feeling rather silly. "But, after all, I brought it on myself." A quarter of an hour later, my Briton seated himself at the piano, and played a nocturne rejoicing in the title of "Evening Breeze," or something equally original. I was told in confidence that it was a piece of his own composition. He played it correctly enough to satisfy a mathematician, without putting more expression into it than a musical-box would have done. For that matter, if you would please a drawing-room audience here, you must sing or play like a machine; no refractory muscle must compromise the British dignity.