It will be well to state the best means of detecting counterfeit coin. The simplest and most effective test is to bite it. If the coin is bad, the bite will produce a very gritty sensation on the teeth, which is never produced by a genuine piece of money. This test will be found to be an infallible one. [Illustration: THE COUNTERFEITER AND HIS CHILD.] _Beauties._ [Illustration: MISS AGNES C. STEVENSON _From a photo. by Alex. Bassano, Old Bond Street, W._ MISS BARNETT _From Catford's Art Gallery, Ilfracombe._ MISS NORA WILLIAMSON _From a Photo. by Alfred Ellis, 20, Upper Baker Street, N.W._ MISS ANNIE O'DEANE. _From a Photo. by H. R. White, Birmingham._ MISS NANCY NOEL. _From a Photo. by Alfred Ellis, 20, Upper Baker Street. N.W._] _How Composers Work._ II. BY FRANCIS ARTHUR JONES. MEYER LUTZ. Herr Meyer Lutz has the rather odd fancy of sitting in the dark for an hour or two at a time, and letting his fingers wander hither and thither over the keys, searching out those measures which set the fashion in the dancing world. [Illustration: truly yours Herr Meyer Lutz] He composes anywhere and everywhere, in the streets, on tops of 'buses, and even in church. "I remember," says the popular Gaiety composer, "driving one Sunday evening to St. George's Cathedral, when the melody to an 'O Salutaris' struck me. I pencilled it down during the sermon, and my brother-in-law, Furneaux Cook, sang it after the sermon at Benediction the same evening." Herr Lutz believes in taking up some verses and carefully studying them. "This I often do," he says, "and soon seem to hear a fitting melody without trying it on the piano till finished." Fugues and canons, in his opinion, want studying and mathematically experimentalizing. "Composers," he says in conclusion, "are musical poets, and 'Poëta nascitur, non fit.'" The music in his autograph will, I imagine, be familiar to not a few of my readers. A. C. MACKENZIE. Most of Dr. Mackenzie's work is done in the morning from nine to one-thirty, and he never touches it in the afternoon. As a rule he leaves _scoring_ for the orchestra or looking over the morning's work for the evening hours. "But," in his own words, "if I feel capable of _inventing_, why, I begin to work again about eight-thirty and continue until I am tired." As a rule, the principal of the Royal Academy of Music sketches his music on two or three lines, as shown in the illustration. "When I am engaged upon anything that absorbs my entire attention," he continues, "I carry a little musical note-book about with me and jot down roughly any idea which may occur to me, and I have found this plan useful. When I am composing I never lose the thread of it, morning, noon, or night; even at meals I am unconsciously occupied with it--this goes on until the work is finished." [Illustration: We have waited for long ... waited for long!]