A clergyman of middle age appeared one day at my house with the request that I should give him some lessons...I accordingly invited him to play something in order that I might know how far he had already progressed. ' Yes, yes, immediately,' he said, 'but before I do so I wish you to look at the list of my deficiencies, which I have prepared in order that you might know at once how to deal with me.' He handed me a sheet of paper...Having pocketed this remarkable document, I renewed my request for the performance of some piece or other, and he proposed to play Beethoven's Sonata with the Funeral March, contained in the book he had brought with him. Sitting down to the piano, he looked attentively at the music and then put his fingers down upon two wrong notes two E naturals. ' E flat,' I said. He held fast to the wrong notes, looked at the music, at his fingers, up and down several times, then turned his head towards me with a smile, said, ' To be sure,' and then removed his fingers from the wrong to the right notes. In the very next bar a similar mistake occurred. I corrected it ; then came the same operation of looking up and down, the same smile, and the same ' To be sure.' This having been repeated four or five times in as many bars, I remained silent afterwards, thinking only of how to get rid of so unpropitious a pupil without giving him offence. He struggled on through about half the first page, which took a considerable time, then suddenly closed the book, held it before my eyes, and said, with another smile, 'Is not that nicely bound?' I assented ; and 'I got it bound when I was at Cambridge,' was the information he gave me. Re-opening the book, he began again at the identical note in the middle of a bar at which he had left off, and after another ten minutes' stumbling he reached at last the end of the first page. By that time I had made up my mind, and told him politely that he was not advanced enough to become one of my pupils, and advised him to go to some other teacher. He was sorry, but submitted. Before leaving he said there was one piece he was most anxious to learn, and 'did I think he could master it?'. 'Which piece?' I inquired ; and 'A Fantasia on the Prophet, by Liszt,' was the answer ; to which I could only reply : 'Not in this world!'. << less