He lies there quite, quite dead. For ever flown the breath that made of this beautiful clay a living man. Lady Florence has him halfway in her arms as she kneels on the floor beside the body of her lover, and between her sobs cries out to them to "Go for the surgeons!" for whom long since Sir Harry sent. Hyacinthe put her hands behind her and leaned heavily against the column that by good chance she found there. When the crowd parted from him a little she leaned over a bit and stared: that was all. "Do not _you_ touch him!" cried the English maiden, maddened by her grief, as she glanced up at the fair face. "No, I will not: I do not wish to," returns the other softly, straightening herself; and leaning there in her close gown, she is as tearless as some caryatid. When the surgeons have come on their useless mission, and gone, when Florence Ffolliott stands weeping and wringing her hands, Hyacinthe ventures over a pace nearer to the two. "You see, Lady Florence," she says very gently, and with that curious sorrowful look on her face that made it so like to the Ariadne's--"you see, he was not meant for any woman: he was a Saxon god." A year later Lady Florence Ffolliott's engagement to her cousin, the little lovelorn viscount, was announced. Sir Henry Leighton told me last week that he had been called in consultation with regard to Hyacinthe King, and that there were not three months of life in her. "She cannot act," said the great medical man: "she plays her parts, it is true, but the power to portray has gone out of her. She is going back to Rome for a while, and, I can assure you, she will never return." MARGUERITE F. AYMAR. MUSICAL NOTATION. Why is it that the knowledge of music is not more common?--that is, why is it that there are so few people in this and every other country who are able to read and write music as they read and write their mother-tongue? Is it that the musical ear is a rare gift? Evidently not, for music is composed of a small number of elements, which are found for the most part in any popular air, and almost every person can sing one or more of these airs correctly. It is not, then, the musical ear nor the sense of time which is wanting. Neither is the cause to be attributed to the fact that few study music; for, although the teaching of music is by no means so general as it should be, still it is taught in our schools, public and private, singing-schools are common even in our small villages, and there is no lack of teachers both of vocal and instrumental music. And yet out of every hundred who take up the study of music, it is safe to say that about ninety abandon it after a short time, discouraged by the almost insurmountable difficulties presented at every turn. Only those succeed who are endowed with rare natural aptitude, an indomitable will, and time--four or five years at least--to devote to an art which is as yet a luxury to the masses of the people.