Podmore, who accompanied her, on the waistcoat, and said, "Poddy, thank you; we'll cut the orange-boy's throat with that voice." It was by the familiar title of orange-boy that the great Baroski was known among his opponents.

"We'll crush him, Podmore," said Lady Thrum, in her deep hollow voice. You may stop and dine." And Podmore stayed to dinner, and ate cold mutton, and drank Marsala with the greatest reverence for the great English composer. The very next day Lady Thrum hired a pair of horses, and paid a visit to Mrs. Crump and her daughter at "Sadler's Wells."

All these things were kept profoundly secret from Walker, who received very magnanimously the allowance of two guineas a-week which Woolsey made him, and with the aid of the few shillings his wife could bring him, managed to exist as best he might. He did not dislike gin when he could get no claret, and the former liquor, under the name of "tape," used to be measured out pretty liberally in what was formerly her Majesty's prison of the Fleet.

Morgiana pursued her studies under Thrum, and we shall hear in the next chapter how it was she changed her name to RAVENSWING.

CHAPTER VII

IN WHICH MORGIANA ADVANCES TOWARDS FAME AND HONOUR, AND IN WHICH SEVERAL GREAT LITER

ARY CHARACTERS MAKE THEIR APPEARANCE

E must begin, my dear madam,” said Sir George Thrum, "by unlearning all that Mr. Baroski (of whom I do not wish to speak with the slightest disrespect) has taught you!" Morgiana knew that every professor says as much, and submitted to undergo the study requisite for Sir George's system with perfect good grace. Au fond, as I was given to understand, the methods of the two artists were pretty similar; but as there was rivalry between them, and continual desertion of scholars from one school to another, it was fair for each to take all the credit he could get in the success of any pupil. If a pupil failed, for instance, Thrum would say Baroski had spoiled her irretrievably; while the German would regret "Dat dat yong voman, who had a good organ, should have trown away her dime wid dat old Drum." When one of these deserters succeeded, "Yes, yes," would either professor cry, "I formed her, she owes her fortune to me." Both of them thus, in future days, claimed the education of the famous Ravenswing; and even Sir George Thrum, though he wished to écraser the Ligonier, pretended that her present success was his work, because once she had been brought by her mother, Mrs. Larkins, to sing for Sir George's approval.

When the two professors met it was with the most delighted cordiality on the part of both. "Mein lieber

Herr," Thrum would say (with some malice), "your sonata in x flat is divine." "Chevalier," Baroski would reply, "dat andante movement in w is worthy of Beethoven. I gif you my sacred honour," and so forth. In fact, they loved each other as gentlemen in their profession always do.

The two famous professors conduct their academies on very opposite principles. Baroski writes ballet music; Thrum, on the contrary, says "he cannot but deplore the dangerous fascinations of the dance," and writes more for Exeter Hall and Birmingham. While Baroski drives a cab in the park with a very suspicious Mademoiselle Léocadie, or Aménaide, by his side, you may see Thrum walking to evening church with his lady, and hymns are sung there of his own composition. He belongs to the " Athenæum Club," he goes to the levée once a-year, he does everything that a respectable man should, and if, by the means of this respectability, he manages to make his little trade far more profitable than it otherwise would be, are we to quarrel with him for it?

Sir George, in fact, had every reason to be respectable. He had been a choir-boy at Windsor, had played to the old King's violoncello, had been intimate with him, and had received knighthood at the hand of his revered sovereign. He had a snuff-box which his Majesty gave him, and portraits of him and the young princes all over the house. He had also a foreign order (no other, indeed, than the Elephant and Castle of Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel), conferred upon him by the Grand Duke when here with the allied sovereigns in 1814. With this ribbon round his neck, on gala days, and in a white waistcoat, the old gentleman looked splendid as he moved along in a blue coat with the Windsor button, and neat black small-clothes, and silk stockings. He

lived in an old, tall, dingy house, furnished in the reign of George III., his beloved master, and not much more cheerful now than a family vault. They are awfully funereal those ornaments of the close of the last century,tall, gloomy, horse-hair chairs, mouldy Turkey carpets, with wretched druggets to guard them, little cracked sticking-plaster miniatures of people in tours and pigtails over high-shouldered mantelpieces, two dismal urns on each side of a lanky sideboard, and in the midst a queer twisted receptacle for worn-out knives with green handles. Under the sideboard stands a cellaret that looks as if it held half a bottle of currant wine, and a shivering plate-warmer that never could get any comfort out of the wretched old cramped grate yonder. Don't you know in such houses the grey gloom that hangs over the stairs, the dull-coloured old carpet that winds its way up the same, growing thinner, duller, and more threadbare, as it mounts to the bed-room floors? There is something awful in the bed-room of a respectable old couple of sixty-five. Think of the old feathers, turbans, bugles, petticoats, pomatum-pots, spencers, white satin shoes, false fronts, the old flaccid, boneless stays tied up in faded riband, the dusky fans, the old forty-years-old baby-linen, the letters of Sir George when he was young, the doll of poor Maria, who died in 1803, Frederick's first corduroy breeches, and the newspaper which contains the account of his distinguishing himself at the siege of Seringapatam. All these lie somewhere, damp and squeezed down into glum old presses and wardrobes. At that glass the wife has sat many times these fifty years; in that old morocco bed her children were born. Where are they now? Fred, the brave captain, and Charles, the saucy colleger; there hangs a drawing of him done by Mr. Beechey, and that sketch by Cosway was the very likeness of Louisa before

"Mr. Fitz-Boodle! for Heaven's sake come down. What are you doing in a lady's bed-room?"

"The fact is, madam, I had no business there in life; but, having had quite enough wine with Sir George, my thoughts had wandered upstairs into the sanctuary of female excellence, where your ladyship nightly reposes. You do not sleep so well now as in old days, though there is no patter of little steps to wake you overhead."

They call that room the nursery still, and the little wicket still hangs at the upper stairs: it has been there for forty years bon Dieu! Can't you see the ghosts of little faces peering over it? I wonder whether they get up in the night as the moonlight shines into the blank, vacant old room, and play there solemnly with little ghostly horses, and the spirits of dolls, and tops that turn and turn but don't hum.

Once more, sir, come down to the lower storey - that is, to the Morgiana story-with which the above sentences have no more to do than this morning's leading article in The Times; only it was at this house of Sir George Thrum's that I met Morgiana. Sir George, in old days, had instructed some of the female members of our family, and I recollect cutting my fingers as a child with one of those attenuated green-handled knives in the queer box yonder.

In those days Sir George Thrum was the first great musical teacher of London, and the royal patronage brought him a great number of fashionable pupils, of whom Lady Fitz-Boodle was one. It was a long, long time ago in fact, Sir George Thrum was old enough to remember persons who had been present at Mr. Braham's first appearance, and the old gentleman's days of triumph had been those of Billington, and Incledon, Catalani and Madame Storace.

He was the author of several operas ("The Camel