If the voice be cultivated, and the piano used as an accompaniment, the music in a girl's education would prove ten-fold more valuable. Indeed, vocal music might prove, with many girls, the most valuable part of education. It is more likely to be continued, because of the greater pleasure it affords; while social singing serves more than any other influence to bind the inmates of a home together. As a source of general health, it stands unrivalled. In this country of consumptives, it is especially valuable in fortifying the pulmonary apparatus. Let us, by every means, foster social singing. Its influence is, in many ways, most precious. How interesting the group of sisters and brothers gathered about the piano, and how blessed the home where the evening is welcomed by family song. Contrast this with the average mechanical execution of classical music, by one of the girls, or with the fashionable operatic singing by one of them. And just here I wish to speak of a fashion which should be deprecated. It is another piece of that growing vice, which would remove music from the social sphere, and make it, like some peculiarity of dress, a mere show. Suppose we have singing. Instead of four persons performing the several parts of some rich melody, Miss Arabella is invited to "give us that exquisite Aria," and we all sit by, and wonder at her execution. The great service of music is one of the heart, and not of the head. There are departments of music, there are possibilities in this divinest of the arts, which appeal to the subtlest appreciations of the intellect, and the most exalted conceptions of the imagination; but still it is true that the greatest service which music renders to man is in the social sphere, is one of the heart When our voices blend, our hearts will not long be kept asunder. The whole tendency of the times is to deprive music of this, its most precious influence. Indeed, so far has this gone, that even that natural and most happy of all the harmonies of music,--that between the male and female voice, is well-nigh lost. It is rare in what is called the better class of music to hear them together. A woman executes for awhile, then a man executes, then the woman executes again, then the man executes a little, so they execute by turns. The great heart-service of music is subordinated to imagination and vanity. BAD MANNERS OF PIANO PLAYERS. It is a mistake to suppose that, even as an accomplishment, piano playing is so very highly prized. I dropped in to spend an hour with an intelligent friend. I was particularly interested in the Franco-Prussian war, and, as he had lived much, both in Paris and Berlin, I hoped to learn about some things not discussed in the newspapers. His youngest daughter, a beautiful girl, had just arrived, fresh from the glories of the closing exercises of a seminary.