Our aspiring young friend from the rural districts who comes to Boston, the great musical centre, for the art-training she cannot enjoy at home, is full of enthusiasm as she crosses the threshold of that teeming hive, the New England Conservatory of Music. The conflicting din of organs, pianos and violins, of ballad, scale and operetta, though discordant to the actual ear have a harmony which is not lost to her spiritual sense. It is a choral greeting to the new recruit, who gathers in a moment all the moral support humanity derives from sympathy and companionship in a common purpose. Devoutly praying that this inspiration may not ooze out at her fingers' ends, she goes into the director's sanctum to be examined. This trial has pictured itself to her active imagination for weeks past. Of course he will ask her to play one of her pieces, perhaps several. Has she not, ever since her plans for coming to the Conservatory were matured, been engaged in carefully training, manipulating, her battle-horse for this critical experiment? As the door of that little room closes upon her her knees begin to tremble. But how easy and reassuring is the director's manner! He requests her to be seated at the piano. Will she be able to remember a note at all? That is now the question. Her musical memory is for the nonce obliterated. He may have an intuition of this, for he says quietly, "Now play me a scale and a five-finger exercise." Cecilia does this mechanically, and feels encouraged. Now for the piece, the battle-horse, to be brought out and shown off. She waits quietly a minute. But he asks for nothing more. Her mere touch expresses to his practised ear her probable grade of acquirement, and he assigns her to the instructor he deems best suited to test her abilities and classify her in accordance with them. In a day or two she finds herself in regular working order, one of a class of four. "And am I only to have fifteen minutes for _my_ lesson," she asks herself, "when I always had an hour from the professor at Woodville?" She knows that recitation is the cream of the lesson. In the actual rendering of her task she can, in justice to her companions, consume but a quarter of the allotted hour, but she soon discovers that she is to a great extent a participant in Misses A----, B---- and C----'s cream. After the master's correction of her own performance, to see and hear the same study played by others with more or less excellence--to compare their faults with her own--is perhaps of greater benefit to her, while in this eminently receptive frame, than a mere personal repetition would be. The horizon is broader: she gets more light on the work in hand. "And now," she asks of her teacher, "how much would you advise, how much do you wish, me to practise?"