He smiles: memory reverts to his own six hours at Leipsic or Stuttgart, but "milk for babes:" "Certainly not less than two hours a day under any circumstances or obstacles, if you care to learn at all. If you have fair health, and neither onerous household duties nor educational demands upon your time outside of music, let me earnestly recommend you to practise four hours. Less than this cannot show the desired result." The new pupil accepts the maximum of four hours' daily practice. "I should be ashamed to give less," she generously confides to herself and her room-mate: "it is but a small proportion, after all, of the twenty-four." But this is not all. There are exercises at the Conservatory apart from her special lessons which are too valuable to a broad musical education to be neglected--the instruction in harmony, sight reading, the art of teaching, analyses of compositions, as well as lectures and concerts. One of the Conservatory exercises strikes her as being alike novel and edifying. This is called "Questions and Answers." A box in one of the halls receives anonymous questions from the pupils from day to day, and once a week a professor of the requisite enlightenment to satisfy the miscellaneous curiosity of six or seven hundred minds devotes a full hour to the purpose. These questions are presumed to relate solely to musical topics, and the custom was instituted for the relief of timid yet earnest inquirers. A motley crew, however, frequently avail themselves of the masquerade privilege to steal in uninvited. Cecilia illustrates these fantastic ramifications of the young idea for the benefit of friends in the interior. She jots down some of these questions and their answers in her note-book: "How does a polka differ from a schottisch?"--"A schottisch is a lazy polka. A polka is the worst thing in the world: the next worst is a schottisch. A schottisch is so lazy, so slow, that a fire would hardly kindle with it." "In preparing to play a piece in public should one practise it up to the last moment?"--"Try it and see: you will soon decide in the negative. Lay it aside some time before if you would avoid nervousness." "What would you give as a first piano-lesson to a young lady who had never taken a lesson before?"--"Make her get the piano-stool at exactly the right height and place: then ensure a good position of her hands and easy motion of the fingers. Let her practise this for three days."