rly anxious to
conceal from his visitors the fact that Jonas Chuzzlewit is
in the house. So he says to the latter--

'This may be a professional call. Indeed I am pretty
sure it is. Thank you.' Then Mr. Pecksniff, gently
warbling a rustic stave, put on his garden hat, seized
a spade, and opened the street door; calmly appearing
on the threshold as if he thought he had, from his
vineyard, heard a modest rap, but was not quite certain.

Then he tells his visitors 'I do a little bit of Adam still.'
He certainly had a good deal of the old Adam in him.

_Clarionet_

The clarionet is associated with the fortunes of Mr. Frederick
Dorrit, who played the instrument at the theatre where his
elder niece was a dancer, and where Little Dorrit sought an
engagement. After the rehearsal was over she and her sister
went to take him home.

He had been in that place six nights a week for many
years, but had never been observed to raise his eyes
above his music-book.... The carpenters had a joke
that he was dead without being aware of it.

At the theatre he had no part in what was going on except the
part written for the clarionet. In his young days his house
had been the resort of singers and players. When the fortunes
of the family changed his clarionet was taken away from him, on
the ground that it was a 'low instrument.' It was subsequently
restored to him, but he never played it again.

Of quite a different stamp was one of the characters in
_Going into Society_, who played the clarionet in a band at
a Wild Beast Show, and played it all wrong. He was somewhat
eccentric in dress, as he had on 'a white Roman shirt and a
bishop's mitre covered with leopard skin.' We are told nothing
about him, except that he refused to know his old friends. In
his story of the _Seven Poor Travellers_ Dickens found the
clarionet-player of the Rochester Waits so communicative that
he accompanied the party across an open green called the Vines,

and assisted--in the French sense--at the performance
of two waltzes, two polkas, and three Irish melodies.

_Bassoon_

A notable bassoon player was Mr. Bagnet, who had a voice
somewhat resembling his instrument. The ex-artilleryman
kept a little music shop in a street near the Elephant and
Castle. There were

a few fiddles in the window, and some Pan's pipes and
a tambourine, and a triangle, and certain elongated
scraps of music.