Waterbury Democrat., 1902-04-28
A MUSICAL PRODIGY.
DweIIer Who Is Annoyed by Youthful Piano Founder.

lives Tn the Hat right beneath mine, 1 said the man with the haunted, wor- ried look and the nervous, jerky man. ner. relates the Washington Star, lis little girl about 12 years of age. She
 is nice, tidy, pleasant-mannered lit | tie girl, too-but I wish, sometimes, | that her father hadn't secured the l government job that brought him to l Washington. Otherwise, he would l probably have remained in northern Missouri with his family, including l that nice, tiiy, asant-mannered lit | tie girl.
 .sWhy? We'll. little girl is talk ing lessons, as tasy say, on the piano 1 forte. She goes to school, of course, and therefore she has to do lot of her practicing in the morning. She l begins about seven o'clock in the morn ing, an hour at which before that fam | fly moved into their flat I was usually employed in dreaming of money and 1 gilt-edged securities and other glori- ous, if impossible, things. The little girl has arrived at that stage of her musical instruction at which she is permitted by her teacher to take up pieces She has quite 9 list of pieces on her little list now, and the things that she does to lem during the early morning hour or so would never. never do to print.
 "She begins the morning with about ten minutes of Duvernay scales She always whaeks two side-by-side keys with each finger in doing this, but that doesn't seem to bother her at all, her main idea being, it would seem, to get through with the scale business just as quickly as possible, in order to reach her 'piece.playing performance.
 'Duvernay having been butchered, quartered, sliced into sections, salted and put away, this nice little girl with the pleasant Kanners. puts sSilvery Waves on the raclS-in more ways than one-and proceeds to make that immemorial bore of a composition sound hke-well, like as if a mule were playing a xylophone solo on a pair of Venetian blinds, if such a thing could be. It is in the variations that the nice little girl makes every moment of 'Silvery Waves an incred- ibly long-drawn-out agony.
 'Silvery Waves having been played off the boards, to employ slangism of the race course, the nice little girl gets the thumbscrews on Verdi's immortal 'Miserere' from IT Trovatore.' Now. I don't yield to anybody in my reverence for the 'Miserere.' I don't suppose there could be more noble and inspir- ing melody than that. But it was as- suredly never designed to be played as rag-time composition. That's how the nice little girl below me plays it. She works in all the syncopat tion of rag time very skillfully. She makes the 'Miserere' sound like something that ought to have words fitted to it about 'mah coal-tar lady or smah crap- shootin' baby and l am always, oh, so glad when she gets through execut- ing that composition-yes executing is the word.
 Being by this time in lightsome. frolicsome mood, the nice little girl hungers for something light and airy, so she takes down The Frolic of the Frogs Waltz She's got this one down so pat, it having been her first piece that she can play the whole thing from beginning to end in something less than 42 seconds, and that's the way she plays it. If grasshoppers could waltz to the dead gallop that she makes of that three-quarter. time composition, they'd never get caught by small boys and be made to spit tobacco iuiee'
 ''She follows this up with The Little Fisher Maiden which by some strange trick of fancy she seems to imagine is n io1J l. cv1 seems to entertain the same notion with respect to My Queen Waltz which is her next performance. It takes her all of "A seconds-I timed her ito play My Queen Waltz from be- ginning to end, and at that, she ap- pears to think she has wasted time. for she scarcely gets through with that before she sprints into Pure As Snow which she renders as if it were dance for marionettes. Then she gets back to the waves mood by going at Waves of the Ocean, which she performs as if it had been written in reel time After she has performed 'Everybody's Dar- ling with great slowness and delibera- tion, exactly the way it hadn't ought to be played, she launches into The Maiden's Prayer which sounds like runaway phonograph. If any maiden ever tried to pray to the pace set by this litle girl she'd establish a worlds record for the greatest number of ut tered words within the space of one minute.
 'sshe is just winding up g1oriously
 tn her first old love, the vindictive lld devilish 'chopsticks,' when re,. mother calls her to breakfast Alon about six o'clock in the evening, when l I'm just settling down to read my Star paper, she goes through the whole thing again, only doing it backward this time, winding up with the mad dening Duvernay.
 "She's nice, tidy, p1easant-man- nered little girl, as I say, but, oh, if her father had only failed to pass his civil service examination!''
 Enterprise of the Germans.
 Wherever you see Germans you see thrift. We have had evidence of it in this country for century. Prince Henry is amazed at it. German enter | prise is making old Palestine blossom anew. Last year a German bank in | Jerusalem exchanged $15,O00,0OO. The I