the occasion, or sometimes that certain gentlemen, of their courtesy, obliged with instrumental or vocal selections. Whence we may infer that the custom of keeping a chest of viols in his house for the use of his family and his guests, so generally observed by the English gentleman at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was still honored by the colonial gentleman at the beginning of the eighteenth. The cultured colonists followed English fashions very closely in all things, and the music they played was doubtless the music in vogue in London drawing-rooms and concert halls. The humble colonists, presumably, were less concerned with the mode, and sang and played the old English tunes which they and their fathers and their grandfathers had brought across the sea. American historians have taken for granted, with a good deal of smug complacency, that there was no real musical life among these people. The assumption seems to be based--if it has any basis--on the fact that the population of the South was preëminently rural. But that there was little urban life does not mean that there was little community life. On the contrary, life in the South was much more intimately gregarious than is usual in towns and cities, and it is in hospitable social gatherings rather than in stiff-backed attendance at concerts and operas that the musical soul of a people finds real expression. Furthermore, the Southern colonists had a communal consciousness, as we may see from their early essays in public education, and it is probable that this consciousness expressed itself in other ways of which we have no evidence. The churches brought them together, also, perhaps for social as well as religious gatherings. It is, indeed, a plausible surmise that musical reunions of some sort, apart from purely private entertainments, were not unknown to them. The music of the colonial proletariat was English, that of the gentlefolk largely so. Among the common people this music may have undergone some alteration in the course of time, and certain gifted ones among them may have made original music of their own. We can conceive that the gentlefolk occasionally occupied themselves with musical composition, and some of their efforts, perchance, percolated through the classes and became the property of all the people. We cannot say, but it is possible; it is even probable. If English music did not undergo a change in Virginia and Maryland and Carolina, we can be sure that it altered somewhat in the hands of the pioneers who carried it to Kentucky, to Missouri, to Texas. One hears in the Southwest many quaint, characteristic old songs and tunes of unmistakably English origin. We can safely assume that by the time they reached Missouri and Texas from England they had absorbed quite a little local color.