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ing to them the decrees of the President or the laws of Congress. Although Ecuador is one of the richest of all the South American countries in its natural resources, there is neither peace nor industry; and until the influence of the Romish church is destroyed and foreign capital and labor are introduced, I do not think there will be progress or prosperity. There is at present no encouragement to immigration, and foreigners are looked upon with distrust. Several colonies of Germans have entered the country, but most of them have died or moved away. Revolutions are frequent; they usually begin by an attempt to assassinate the President. The plan of procedure is usually for the discontented political faction to create a mutiny in the army, either by bribes to the officers or promises of promotion. As the private soldiers always obey their officers, like so many automatons, and are as willing to fight on one side as the other, to secure the officers is to secure the army. The next step is to seize the barracks and arsenal, put the President to death, proclaim some one else provisional dictator, and then call a junta, or convention, to nominate a constitutional executive. Señor Caamaño seems to bear a charmed life, as for three years, while he has been President, he has had numerous remarkable escapes. The last attempt to assassinate him was in January 1886, while he was going from Guayaquil to Quito. He was rid

to the river, swam to the other side, and made his way, thirty miles on foot, to the hacienda of a friend, where he found refuge. For two days and nights he was in the forest without food, and when he finally reached a haven he was totally exhausted. For a week or ten days he lay ill with a fever, but couriers were sent to Guayaquil and Quito, and arriving before the reports of his assassination, assured the government officials of his safety. At the same time a mutiny broke out at the military garrisons in both cities, but was quelled, and the leaders were summarily shot.

The man who originated this revolution was Elroy Alfaro, a native of Ecuador, and the unsuccessful candidate for the presidency when Caamaño was elected. He had been engaged in such undertakings before, and at the time of Caamaño's

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RUINS OF THE PALACE OF ATAHUALPA.

ing, as travelers usually do, by night, to escape the heat of the sun, when his small escort was attacked by a band of mountaineers, and fled, leaving the President to look out for himself. He jumped from his horse, ran into the forest which encloses the road, and creeping through the trees

inauguration was very nearly successful in an attempt to overthrow the government. For several months he had control of the provinces along the sea-coast, but was finally driven out by the legitimate army, and escaped to Colombia, where his last plot was planned. The govern

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EARLY NEW-ENGLAND CHOIRS AND SINGING-SCHOOLS.

BY FREDERIC G. MATHER.

ANDEL led the advance in the contest of the eighteenth century as to whether the Lord or the Devil should have the better music. It was, indeed, a struggle of great proportions. Two hundred years before that time the Meister-singers had left the impress of their culture upon the German people. They had also thrown their influence upon the side of the Reformation. Un

sentimental England acknowledged their power by laying aside the songs of the Crusaders for the chants of the blind crowders and the lays of the minstrels. Then came the ribald lines of the Cavaliers, and the friendly sarcasms known as masques, which marked the greater part of the seventeenth century. With the end of the English Revolution, Henry Purcell appeared as the founder of the modern school of English music, in the same manner that Samuel Richardson afterward gave us a prototype of the modern novel in the pages of "Pamela" and "Sir Charles Grandison."

Handel's earlier years were passed while the adolescent opera was in a transition state. The change from the English to the Italian score was the triumph of Bononcini and the destruction of Handel. Failing in opera, Handel revived the scriptural dramas of Neri, which, as the or atorios, still remain the massive glory of sacred numbers. Sacred music, cathedral and otherwise, was also produced by Weldon, Greene, Boyce, Arnold and Cooke. The last half of the century witnessed a swarm of composers more purely secular in their efforts. What Boyce was to sacred music, Arne, Giardini and Linley were to Vauxhall, Sadler's Wells and the London Theatre. Many of their songs would pass the bounds of decency to-day; but they revealed the popular taste of an age that relished the works of Fielding, Smollett and Sterne.

While the battle was raging between the cathedrals and the oratorios on one hand, and Vauxhall and the operas on the other, Handel had passed away. Haydn and Pleyel were doing their best for the cause of sacred music, and Jackson was giving a more melodious expression to the better class of lyric poetry. Dibdin sang of the ocean; while the declining years of the century showed that the interests of music had fallen into the hands of Shields, Webb and others, who could adapt rather than create; who could copy better than they could compose. It was a kind of draw-game; but the devil had held his own very well, and he had secured his share of the new music that was worth preserving.

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THE LEADER FROM THE CITY.

In the Established churches, choirs
came into favor, with orchestras of
flutes, hautboys, clarionets, violoncel-
los, bassoons and serpents; and what a
sound was there-what a chaos of caco-
phony-when the "village choristers"
gave the "Hallelujah Chorus," with such
a variety of halleluyas, holleluyears and
allyluyers, and ahmens, aumens and
ameens that none except those who had
heard it before knew what the singers
were about. It was not strange, after such
a performance, that the rector protested
against being fiddled out of church";
or that he announced a hymn, and added: And the precentor responding:
"Now, let the people of God sing."

the choir took up the explanation and his
comments line by line after this fashion:
My eyes, indeed, are very dim;
I cannot see at all.

I really b'lieve you are b'witched:
The devil's in you all.

In later years, the precentor-well
wigged and powdered-stood forth and
led the song, the minister saying:
Like to an owl on ivy bush,

That woeful thing am I.

Or, the precentor, as a part of his duties, trained the children to sing from Watts' "Divine and Moral Songs," by linking every two lines together without reference to the meaning, as:

Birds in their little nests agree:
And 'tis a shameful sight.

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In America, the contest was not so much between sacred and secular music as it was between the good rendering and the poor rendering of sacred music itself. The emigrants to New Amster dam were provided with a house for a school, which can likewise be occupied by the person who will be sexton, psalmsetter and schoolmaster." So great was the reverence for psalm tunes in the earlier days of New England, that the people often took off their hats, as in the prayer time, whenever they heard one sung. And yet, with all this reverence, there was so much opposition to public. singing, that groups of the brethren would remain outside of the church doors till it was over. A writer in the New England Chronicle in 1723 declared: "Truly I have a great jealousy, that if we once begin to sing by rule, the next thing will be to pray by rule and preach by rule; and then comes Popery." A council of churches held at Braintree, in the same year, to regulate the disorders occasioned by regular singing," ordered "to sing by rule and by note alternately, for the satisfaction of both parties;" but such an arrangement could not last long. The advocates of regular singing believed with Julius Pollux of old that "there are no less than thirty-seven qualities of the human voice," and that these various qualities must be trained just as the various pipes of an organ must be tuned; so they were glad to welcome the Rev. John Tufts, of the parish of Newbury, who, being grieved that York, Hackney, St.

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Mary, Windsor and Martyrs, were the only tunes sung by note, had, in 1714, published the first book in New England "on the art of singing psalm tunes, with trebles of twenty-eight tunes, so that they may be learned." Thus the reverend Tufts became the predecessor of the singing-schoolmaster in New England; while, along the Hudson River, we learn that Ichabod Crane had "instructions in psalmody" every week; that "his voice resounded far above the rest of the choir and congregation"

THE SINGING-SCHOOL TEACHER.

that "the echoes are still ringing through Sleepy Hollow."

Our theme is of New England as it was two or three generations ago. The district school was taught by a woman two months in the summer for the little ones, and two months in the winter by a college student for the youth. The course of study included neither grammar nor geography. "The Three R's" were the curriculum, reading, 'rit

ing and 'rithmetic ;" and the only works at hand for general reading were the "Letters of Junius," "Gulliver's Travels," Tristram Shandy," "The Vicar of Wakefield," Tom Jones " and The

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New England Primer," with its " In Adam's Fall, We Sinned All," a fitting thing for the boy to

learn who dared to break over the custom of "keeping Saturday night." Those days came long before Catharine Hayes linked the operatic strains of Madame Grisi with the ballads of Jenny Lind; before Russell dived deep in his boots to find the notes of "The Old Sexton "; before Mario warbled "the chest C," or Brignoli essayed "M'appari; " and before "Take My Yoke Upon You" was set to the garden scene in "Faust," or "Guide me, Oh Thou Great Jehovah " followed the plaint of the wanderer in

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'Martha." Those elder days of which we sing marked the triumph of the choir over every form of opposition; and they were days long to be remembered.

Talk not to us of Patti's fame,
Or Nicolini's tender frame,
Or Cary's alto-but a name-

Or Whitney's wondrous basso.
They sing no more like Jane Sophia
And Anna Maria, Obadiah,
And Zedekiah in our choir,

Than cats sing like Tomasso.

And when the church in the next town was to be dedicated, with what pride did we take over the choir from our town," and how we folded our hands with satisfaction as we saw Grandfather Jabez leading the combined choirs of the several towns; Uncle Nathan taking a leading part, and Cousin Elijah playing the flute obligato to Aunt Fanny's solo. Happy were we if we could add a bass-viol to the orchestra. The violin and clarionet were set apart for dancing. As for organs, but one church in all that region had such an expensive and "citified" machine; and as for the propriety of using the thing in the meeting-house, God never intended that man should make music by kicking his heels in a box like that! He should be praised with all kinds of in struments as in the days of Daniel.

The choir was recruited from the singing-school, either through gratuitous instruction on the part of the choir, or more frequently by hiring a teacher, who came at stated intervals, paid his own bills, and refused to "board round." He was a "professional," who solicited pupils at so much a head for so many evenings once in two weeks. The village schoolmaster was nowhere when the singing-school teacher came around; but if anyone in the village-like the newlyarrived blacksmith-attempted to put on airs, he was sure to find that the boys had introduced his bow to a candle just before it was time to go to school. The earlier teachers had no instruments, but afterward the violin came in, and then the bass-viol. Many a time had Daniel Webster driven over those bleak hills with his college mate, who carried on a string of singing schools, a fact that he recalled fifty years later in the words, "You are still B--, with your old bassviol, with Laus Deo painted on the back."

Many a memory have others of those long winter evenings, when sleighing parties were formed to go to the school," and when every girl was sure

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