rselves in our quiet way. Krespel was
always entertaining with his strange eccentricities; but it was really
Antonia who drew me to the house, and made me put up with a great deal
which, impatient as I was in those days, I should never have endured
but for her. In Krespel's quirks and cranks there was often a good deal
which was tedious, and not in the best of taste. What most annoyed me
was that, whenever I led the conversation to music--particularly to
vocal music--he would burst in, in that horrible singing voice of his,
and smiling like a demon, with something wholly irrelevant and
generally disgustingly unimportant at the same time. From Antonia's
looks of annoyance on those occasions, it was clear that he did this to
prevent me from asking her to sing. However, I wasn't going to give in:
the more he objected, the more determined was I to carry my point. I
felt that I must hear her, or die of my dreams of it.

"There came an evening when Krespel was in particularly good humour.
He had taken an old Cremona violin to pieces, and found that the
sound-post of it was about half a line more perpendicular than usual.
Important circumstance!--of priceless practical value! I was fortunate
enough to start him off on the true style of violin playing. The style
of the great old masters--copied by them from that of the really grand
singers--of which he spoke, led to the observation that now the direct
converse held good, and that singers copied the scale, and skipping
'passages' of the instrumentalists. 'What,' said I, hastening to the
piano and sitting down at it, 'can be more preposterous than those
disgusting mannerisms, more like the noise of peas rattling on the
floor of a barn than music?' I went on to sing a number of those modern
cadenza-passages, which go yooping up and down the scale, more like a
child's humming-top than anything else, and I struck a feeble chord or
two by way of accompaniment. Krespel laughed immoderately, and cried
'Ha! ha! ha! I could fancy I was listening to some of our German
Italians, or our Italian Germans, pumping out some aria of Pucitt or
Portugallo, or some other such _maestro di capella_, or rather _schiavo
d' un prime uomo_.'

"'Now,' thought I, 'is my chance at last.--I am sure Antonia,' I said,
turning to her, 'knows nothing of all that quavering stuff,' and I
commenced to roll out a glorious soulful aria of old Leonardo Leo's.
Antonia's cheeks glowed; a heavenly radiance beamed from h