Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: hour. Thus we talked freedom and meant conservatism, and talked conservatism and meant freedom; and, as we talked, we thought. There is another little chapter in our family story that we cannot afford to pass; for it brought on the family to an advanced grade in character and respect. Finding me intent on knowing something about music, my good mother procured me a book, and taught me the very little that she knew, the letters of the gamut, the key-note and how to find it, the intervals and times of the notes. But this was only book, and still the question was, how to put in the voice; and this she could not tell me, for it is a matter too abstruse for anybody till after a beginning made by example. But she could sing what she had learned by the ear, and there we made a beginning. Presently I took to watching the notes, observing how the intervals and times kept along, and shortly began to almost sing with us; till, finally, I took the hint of a reverse process—that as here we had been singing airs we knew into notes we did not, so I might learn to sing airs I did not know out of similar notations, to be learned by practice and comparison. This unlocked the method, and further progress after this was easy. The result was that our little family grew into a very pretty choir in a few years' time, and the whole family world was changed. We had no dissipations abroad, because our vacant spaces were filled with hymns and glees and such-like humorous and sentimental pleasures. Let anybody laugh who will at the probable merit of the music; we thought it good, because it did us good. And' now, at this far-off day, after we have heard a great deal of the richest and most cultivated music, there is nothing we remember with so much delight and affection as the iu-door pleasures thus enjoye...