that no encores were
to be given. Lady Alwyne Compton, wife of the Dean of Worcester, very
kindly assisted as a performer, my wife having frequently sung at
charity concerts and entertainments for her in Worcester and the
neighbourhood, among them a recital by Mr. Brandram of _A
Midsummer-Night's Dream_, when she undertook the soprano solos
occurring in the play, at the Worcester Guildhall. Lady Alwyne Compton
was very musical, and rehearsals were held in the stone-vaulted crypt
beneath the Deanery, a place of splendid acoustic properties, which
intensified the sound without coarsening it, and brought the voice
back to the singer in a way unknown on the usual platform, decorated
with screens, curtains, and flags, and obstructed by floral
impedimenta.

Among the performers at the Malvern concerts some professionals had
been engaged from London, including Miss Margaret Wild, a well-known
pianist. I had given my men a holiday for the occasion and was anxious
to hear their opinion of the performances. They considered the music
rather too high class for them, but they thoroughly appreciated the
nimble fingers of Miss Margaret Wild; one of them adding
enthusiastically: "My word, her did make 'im (the piano) rottle!" Our
old parish clerk too, at the time over eighty years of age, who walked
three miles to Evesham Station in the morning, ascended the
Worcestershire Beacon--nearly 1,500 feet--and finally walked back from
Evesham to Badsey at night, was much struck by the recitations of Miss
Isabel Bateman at the concert. The dear old man was somewhat deaf, and
told me that, sitting towards the back of the room, "I couldn't hear
nothing, but I could see as the gesters [gestures] was all right."

This old clerk was prominently devout in the church responses, and had
some original pronunciations of unusual words; in the Nicene Creed he
generally followed a few bars, so to speak, behind the Vicar, but one
never failed to catch the words "apost'lick church" towards the end.
He was very scornful of ghosts, and told me that he had been about the
churchyard very often at night for fifty years without seeing anything
like an apparition. But the whole village was alarmed, including the
clerk, one Sunday when, about midnight, the tenor bell was heard
solemnly tolling. The clerk, with some supporters and a lantern,
unlocked the door, and found the village idiot--silly C.--in the tower
ringing the bell. It appeared that, after service, th