lely, and he
wound up his performance by a most unexpected and
misplaced embellishment, or 'turn.' Dickens found the
whole ordeal very trying, but managed to preserve a
decorous silence till this sound fell on his ear, when
his neighbour said to him, 'Whatever did he mean by
that extraneous effort of melody?' 'Oh,' said Dickens,
'that's quite in accordance with rule. When things
are at their worst they always take a _turn_.'

Forster relates that while he was at work on the _Old Curiosity
Shop_ he used to discover specimens of old ballads in his
country walks between Broadstairs and Ramsgate, which so
aroused his interest that when he returned to town towards
the end of 1840 he thoroughly explored the ballad literature
of Seven Dials,[4] and would occasionally sing not a few of
these wonderful discoveries with an effect that justified
his reputation for comic singing in his childhood. We get a
glimpse of his investigations in _Out of the Season_, where
he tells us about that 'wonderful mystery, the music-shop,'
with its assortment of polkas with coloured frontispieces, and
also the book-shop, with its 'Little Warblers and Fairburn's
Comic Songsters.'

Here too were ballads on the old ballad paper and
in the old confusion of types, with an old man in a
cocked hat, and an armchair, for the illustration
to Will Watch the bold smuggler, and the Friar of
Orders Grey, represented by a little girl in a hoop,
with a ship in the distance. All these as of yore,
when they were infinite delights to me.

On one of his explorations he met a landsman who told him
about the running down of an emigrant ship, and how he heard
a sound coming over the sea 'like a great sorrowful flute or
Aeolian harp.' He makes another and very humorous reference to
this instrument in a letter to Landor, in which he calls to mind

that steady snore of yours, which I once heard piercing
the door of your bedroom ... reverberating along the
bell-wire in the hall, so getting outside into the
street, playing Aeolian harps among the area railings,
and going down the New Road like the blast of a trumpet.

The deserted watering-place referred to in _Out of the Season_
is Broadstairs, and he gives us a further insight into its
musical resources in a letter to Miss Power written on July 2,
1847, in which he says that

a little tinkling box of music that stops at 'come'