“It may indeed,” answered Amelia; “and I am so sensible of it that unless you have a mind to see me faint before your face, I beg you will order me something—a glass of water if you please.” And then that most fascinating chronicler, Henry Fielding, Esq., proceeds to relate the further history of Captain Booth’s good lady, but not until Mrs. Bennet infuses some “hartshorn drops” into a glass of water for her. All this was about 1750. Since then Miss Austen and her troop of youthful creatures, swooning to order, have stolen with charming graces across the canvas of fiction; the young woman of 1750, with her needles and her scruples, has quite vanished; and passed away is the girl who played the piano in the stiff Victorian drawing-rooms of our mothers. It has always seemed to me that slippery haircloth sofas and the Battle of Prague dwelt in mutual harmony. And now at the beginning of the century the girls who devote time to the keyboard merely for the purpose of social display are almost as rare as the lavender water ladies of morbid sensibilities in the Richardson and Fielding novels. It was one of the new English essayists who wrote of The Decay of Sensibility. He meant the Jane Austen girl; but I wonder if the musical girl of the old sort may not be also set down for study—the study we accord to rare and disappearing types. Yet never has America been so musical, never so crowded the recitals of popular pianists, while piano manufacturers bewail the day’s brevity, so eager for their instruments is the public. Here is a pretty paradox: the piano is passing and with it the piano girl,—there really was a piano girl,—and more music was never made before in the land!