An accomplished Greek gentleman played to me to-day some of the music preserved in the ceremonials of the Greek church; believed to be the most ancient known, and still heard in wild melodies of the mountaineers. On the pianoforte it cannot be truly rendered; yet the character is ineffaceable, the music is indeed beautiful. It seems as it would never come to a close,—only pause in a divine expectancy. CHAPTER VIII. In Oscan Land.—Italia. FOUND AT POMPEII. THE GRECO-ROMAN FLUTES. Four flutes were found at Pompeii, and they were all of one pattern, of greater length, yet following the same system as in that latest Greek invention illustrated and described in the last chapter, and indeed may be considered as the final development attained by the Greeks in instruments of the flute kind, for nothing has to this day been discovered in advanced superiority to it for musical capability or for display of refined workmanship and technical ingenuity. These instruments, are, it is true, classed as Greco-Roman, but they are essentially Greek, although of the period of the Roman dominion. The body of the flute is ivory, and it is twenty-one inches long, bored throughout in perfect cylindrical bore three-eighths of an inch diameter. Think of the skill necessary to accomplish this with most primitive tools! Then the ivory is surrounded by a closely fitting series of cylinders of bronze and silver alternately in sections, and each section possesses just sufficient ease of fitting that it may be caused to rotate on the ivory by simple pressure of the finger upon a little metal loop which had been provided for that purpose. The end sections are fixed to the ivory tube, and thus hold the others in their positions. The appearance of the instrument is most attractive—bands of olive-coloured bronze, with bands of silver intervening. The finger holes, to the number of eleven, are bored in the ivory at the proper distances, and corresponding holes are made in the bronze tube. When these holes in the ivory and in the bronze are set in line and correspond, then the note can be sounded proper to each opening as related to the sounding lengths of the tube; but the player, by turning any selected bronze section to the right or left, can close the finger hole so that the note is left out of the scale. It is a charmingly simple device, and yet how many ages had to pass before human intelligence contrived it, and nations of men had passed likewise—gone back into the dust that they rose out of.