But his one great delight was to come over to Old Lyon Hall in the evening, and hear Drusilla sing and play. Now, we know that her greatest gift was music. She sang with a passion and power equalled by no one in private circles, and excelled by but few in professional life. Honest Colonel Seymour had never in all his earthly experience had the privilege of hearing a great public singer. Therefore the performances of Drusilla affected, I might even say, overwhelmed him or transported him, with equal wonder and delight. And Drusilla exerted herself hour after hour, and evening after evening, to please him, and took as much pleasure herself in the intense appreciation of her one single old adorer, as ever a great prima donna did in the applause of a whole world. And the honest old gentleman’s head was fairly turned with admiration and gratitude. “To think,” he said, as he walked home with his wife and daughter, one moonlight night, after spending an evening at Old Lyon Hall, “to think of having such a voice as that in the neighborhood! to think of being able to hear it several times a week, for the asking! Oh! it ought, indeed it ought, to raise the price of real estate in this locality! And it would do it, too, if people really could feel what good music is!” “Papa,” laughed the old wife, “you are an old gander. And if you were not gray and bald, and very good, I should be jealous.” “Oh, but mother, such strains! Oh, my Heavens, such divine strains!” he exclaimed, catching his breath in ecstasy. “What will you do when your St. Cecilia leaves the neighborhood?” inquired his daughter. “Leave the neighborhood! is she going to do that?” gasped the music-maniac. “They are all going to Washington, next winter, she says.” “Then we’ll—go too. I say, mother, _one_ season in town, would not be amiss for Nanny; and so we can take her there next winter; and then I may swim and soar in celestial sounds every evening!” “Papa, now you are too provoking, and _I_ am jealous,” said Nanny. “For my part, I don’t like music any more than I do any other sort of racket. And I do think if there is one nuisance worse than another, it is a singing and playing lunatic, filling the whole room full of shrieks and crashes, just as if a thousand housemaids were smashing a million of dishes, and squalling together over the catastrophe!” “Oh, child, child, what a misfortune for you to have been born deaf, as to your divine ears!” answered the old gentleman in tones of deep and sincere pity and regret. “I’m sure, papa, I often wish I had been born deaf as to my bodily ears! I mean, when your divinity is shrieking and thrashing, and raising such a hullabaloo that I can’t hear myself speak!” said Nanny. “Ah! ‘_that_ accounts for the milk in the cocoanut!’ You can’t hear yourself speak, and you prefer the sound of your own sweet voice to the music of the spheres!” “If the music of the spheres is _that_ sort of noise, I certainly do, papa.”