"Oh, my eye, what a novelty! Ma, Mr Reginald's going to play for musical chairs! Sam, do you hear?
Mr Cruden plays the piano! Isn't it fun ?" Reginald flung himself with a sigh down on the cracked music-stool.
Music was his one passion, and the last few months had been bitter to him for want of it.

He would go out of his way even to hear a street piano, and the brightest moments of his Sundays were often those spent within sound of the roll of the organ.
It was like a snatch of the old life to find his fingers once more laid caressingly on the notes of a piano; and as he touched them and began to play, the Shucklefords, the _Rocket_, "Omega," all faded from his thoughts, and he was lost in his music.
What a piano it was! Tinny and cracked and out of tune.

The music was in the boy's soul, and it mattered comparatively little.

He began with Weber's "last waltz," and dreamed off from it into a gavotte of Corelli's, and from that into something else, calling up favourite after favourite to suit the passing moods of his spirit, and feeling happier than he had felt for months.
But Weber's "last waltz" and Corelli's gavottes are not the music one would naturally select for musical chairs; and when the strains continue uninterrupted for five or ten-minutes, during the whole of which time the company is perambulating round and round an array of empty chairs, the effect is somewhat monotonous.

Mrs Shuckleford's guests trotted round good-humouredly for some time, then they got a little tired, then a little impatient, and finally Samuel, as he passed close behind the music-stool, gave the performer a dig in the back, which had the desired effect of stopping the music suddenly.