" The peculiarity of Miss Maria's music was that after
a scramble over the notes, suggestive of some one running to get
impetus for a jump, and when the ear waited impatiently for the
consummation, Miss Maria baulked her leap, so to speak, and got no
farther, and began the scramble again, and stuck once more, and so on.
And as, whilst finding the running passage quite too much for one
hand, she struggled on with a different phrase in the other hand at
the same time, instead of practising the two hands separately, her
chances of final success seemed remote indeed. Then I heard the
performance in peculiar circumstances. Nurse Bundle had opened my
window, and about two minutes after my cousin commenced her practice,
an organ-grinder in the street below began his. The subject of poor
Maria's piece knew no completion, as she stuck halfway; but the
organ-grinder's melodies only stopped for a touch to the mechanism,
and Black-Eyed Susan passed into the Old Hundredth, awkwardly, but
with hardly a perceptible pause. The effect of the joint performance
was at first ludicrous, and by degrees maddening, especially when we
had come to the Old Hundredth, which was so familiar in connection
with the words of the Psalm.
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