What days those were when old William Dewey and Dicky, and Reuben and Michael Mail played in the Mellstock church! What a fine personal character such music had! How they loved to play--these simple rustics, and how intimate was the relation between their music and the people and the place! Read the early chapters of “Under the Greenwood Tree” and listen to the ardent discussions between the players before they go out on their Christmas rounds. “‘They should have stuck to strings as we did, and keep out clar’nets, and done away with serpents. If you’d thrive in musical religion, stick to strings, says I.’ ... ‘Yet there’s worse things than serpents,’ said Mr. Penny. ‘Old things pass away, ’tis true; but a serpent was a good old note; a deep rich note was the serpent.’ ... ‘Robert Penny, you was in the right!’ broke in the eldest Dewey. ‘They should ha’ stuck to strings.’ ‘Your brass-man is a rafting dog--well and good; your reed-man is a dab at stirring ye--well and good; your drum-man is a rare bowel-shaker--good again. But I don’t care who hears me say it, nothing will spak to your heart wi’ the sweetness o’ the man of strings.’” In the preface to his book Hardy speaks of the advantage to the village churches of that time of having these volunteer players and singers, and how their displacement by the harmonium with its one player “has tended to stultify the professed aims of the clergy, its direct result being to curtail and extinguish the interest of parishioners in church doings.” This holds good in our own village churches to-day, for we consider music more a means of entertaining the church-goer than of enlisting his interest in the services. Women’s clubs provide a certain sort of musical life to small communities. They foster the performance by members of rather variegated programmes of pianoforte pieces and songs, with an occasional concert by a paid performer from abroad, and they sometimes make a study of a composer or a period of music. Many of them lose sight of the only possible means of vitally influencing the musical life of their own members and of the community at large. In some of the communities of which I am writing there are choral societies. In very few is there any well-sustained and continuous choral organization giving concerts year after year supported by the general public. The record of choral singing in America shows a constant endeavor to attain grandiose results rather than to foster the love of choral singing for itself. Singing societies are continually wrecked by the expense of highly paid soloists, and are continually striving for something beyond their reach.