n no practice
at all? But, my dear ladies, if you practise properly, several times
every day, ten minutes at a time, your strength and your patience are
usually sufficient for it; and, if you are obliged to omit your regular
"hour's practice," you have, at any rate, accomplished something with
your ten minutes before breakfast, or before dinner, or at any leisure
moment. So, I beg of you, let me have my minutes.

Practise often, slowly, and without pedal, not only the smaller and
larger etudes, but also your pieces. In that way you gain, at least, a
correct, healthy mode of playing, which is the foundation of beautiful
playing. Do you do this when neither your teacher, nor your father or
mother is present to keep watch over you? Do you never say, "Nobody is
listening"?

Do you take enough healthy exercise in the open air? Active exercise, in
all weather, makes strong, enduring piano fingers, while subsisting on
indoor-air results in sickly, nervous, feeble, over-strained playing.
Strong, healthy fingers are only too essential for our present style of
piano-playing, which requires such extraordinary execution, and for our
heavy instruments. So I still beg for the minutes: your walks take up
hours enough.

Excessive and fatiguing feminine occupations, and drawing, or painting,
are by no means consistent with an earnest, practical musical education;
not only because both those occupations require so much time, but
because they deprive the fingers of the requisite pliability and
dexterity, while knitting, according to the latest discoveries, produces
an unnatural nervous excitement, which is unfavorable to healthy
progress in music. I at least, in my instruction on the piano, have
never been able to accomplish much with ladies who are devoted to
knitting, crochet, and embroidering. My dear ladies, you who have been
born in fortunate circumstances, and have been educated by your parents,
without regard to expense, should, at least, allow the poor girl in the
country, who is obliged to hide her talents under a bushel, the small
privilege of making a collar for your mother's or your aunt's birthday
present. I assure you your mother or your aunt, if you surprise them
instead with a fine piano performance, will be as much pleased as if you
strained your eyes and bent your back for days and nights over the
needle-work. And now as regards painting: painting and music, though
theoretically so nearly related, agree but poorly in