What! didn’t you know? I thought that everybody knew that. Why not have asked before? Could have told you at any time. That is the way that secrets have of coming out,—“promiskuss like,” as they say in the village. Now it seems that the bulbed mystery that we have been tantalized about, and which has so worried the lobes of our brain on sleepless nights, is after all a piece of nature, coaxed by artifice to be non-natural. A method of waist making was practised in early life to ensure the result desired; it was an instance not of design in nature, but of design upon nature, much as the modern young lady’s waist is. The simplicity of the explanation is charming. There is a passage in Pliny referred to by Mr. W. Chappell in his History of Music, and I will quote what he says. What it means I do not know, but that is by no means an objection, as one mystery is at least left, and what we shall do when every secret is open is a mystery past finding out! Pliny, in describing the reeds grown in Lake Orchomenus, in Bœotia, says that one which was pervious throughout was called the piper’s reed (_Auleticon_). This reed, says he, used to take nine years to grow, as it was for that period the waters of the lake were continually on the increase. If the flood lasted at the full for a year the reeds were cut for double pipes (_Zeugitæ_), and if the waters subsided sooner, the reeds were not so fine, were called _Bombyciæ_, and were used for single pipes. There is another account of this furnished by the ever learned Mr. J. F. Rowbotham, in his so styled “History of Music,” which is no history, but a monologue (attractive, truly) on the historical progress of the art of music during some centuries. He says that the whole account is in Theophrastus (Hist. Plant, IV., 11), and names the lake differently. The passage runs thus:—