, hastening down, beheld an upright piano, the first we ever
saw or heard of! Nothing can describe the amazement of silence that
filled us. It rose almost to superstitious reverence, and all that day
was a dream and marvel." It is such pianos that are appreciated. It is
in such parlors that the instrument best answers the end of its
creation. There is many a piano in the back room of a little store, or
in the uncarpeted sitting-room of a farm-house, that yields a larger
revenue of delight than the splendid grand of a splendid drawing-room.
In these humble abodes of refined intelligence, the piano is a dear and
honored member of the family.

The piano now has a rival in the United States in that fine instrument
before mentioned, which has grown from the melodeon into the cabinet
organ. We do not hesitate to say, that the cabinet organs of Messrs.
Mason and Hamlin only need to be as generally known as the piano in
order to share the favor of the public equally with it. It seems to us
peculiarly the instrument for _men_. We trust the time is at hand when
it will be seen that it is not less desirable for boys to learn to play
upon an instrument than girls; and how much more a little skill in
performing may do for a man than for a woman! A boy can hardly be a
perfect savage, nor a man a money-maker or a pietist, who has acquired
sufficient command of an instrument to play upon it with pleasure. How
often, when we have been listening to the swelling music of the cabinet
organs at the ware-rooms of Messrs. Mason and Hamlin in Broadway, have
we desired to put one of those instruments in every clerk's
boarding-house room, and tell him to take all the ennui, and half the
peril, out of his life by learning to play upon it! No business man who
works as intensely as we do can keep alive the celestial harmonies
within him,--no, nor the early wrinkles from his face,--without some
such pleasant mingling of bodily rest and mental exercise as playing
upon an instrument.

The simplicity of the means by which music is produced from the cabinet
organ is truly remarkable. It is called a "reed" instrument; which leads
many to suppose that the cane-brake is despoiled to procure its
sound-giving apparatus. Not so. The reed employed is nothing but a thin
strip of brass with a tongue slit in it, the vibration of which causes
the musical sound. One of the reeds, though it produces a volume of
sound only surpassed by the pipes of an organ, weighs