"Bless my heart, are you done?" cried Mr Blewitt, breaking off in the middle of a solo, which he found himself performing to his own astonishment. Mr Harrower and Mr Fogle threw up their eyes with an intensity of contempt that defies description. To be sure, neither of them had kept either time or tune all the way through. Mr Harrower's violoncello had growled and groaned, at intervals, in a manner truly pitiable; and Mr Fogle's bow had done nothing but dance and leap, in a perpetual staccato from the first bar to the last, to the entire confusion of both melody and concord. But they had both managed to be in at the death, and were therefore entitled to sneer at the unhappy flutist. Mr Eugene Lilylipz, who had annoyed Miss Fanny throughout the performance, by invariably turning over the leaf at the wrong place, now broke into a volley of raptures, of which the words "Devaine" and "Chawming," were among the principal symbols. A buzz of approbation ran round the room, warm in proportion to the relief which the cessation of the Dutch concert afforded. Mr Harrower and his coadjutors grew communicative, and vented an infinite quantity of the jargon of dilettanteism upon each other, and upon those about them. They soon got into a discussion upon the merits of different composers, whose names served them to bandy to and fro in the battledore and shuttlecock of conversation. Beethoven was cried up to the seventh heaven by Mr Harrower for his grandeur and sublimity, and all that sort of thing. "There is a Miltonic greatness about the man!" he exclaimed, throwing his eyes to the ceiling, in the contemplation of a visionary demigod. "A vastness, a massiveness, an incomprehensible--eh, eh?--ah, I can't exactly tell what, that places him far above all other writers." "Every man to his taste," insinuated Mr Blewitt; "but I certainly like what I can understand best. Now I don't understand Beethoven; but I _can_ understand Mozart, or Weber, or Haydn." "It is very well if you do!" retorted the violoncellist, reflecting probably on the recent specimen Mr Blewitt had given of his powers. "It is more than everybody does, I can tell you." "Od, gentlemen, but it's grand music onyhow, and exceeding justice you have done it, if I may speak my mind. But ye ken I'm no great shakes of a judge."