and soon was seen peeping through at the surface among the lightest and most catchy. . . . The sacred solo found its level among the heavier in its class, and, if the term may be here applied, it was also a hit."
S. Duncan Baker, born August 25, 1855, still lives (1902) in the old family residence at Natchez, Mississippi. "In this house is located the den where he has spent many hours with his collection of banjos and pictures, and in writing for and playing on the instrument which he adopted as a favourite during its dark days (about 1871)." We learn that he composed an "artistic banjo solo," entitled Memories of Farland. "Had this production or its companion piece, Thoughts of the Cadenza, been written by an old master for some other instrument and later have been adapted by a modern composer to the banjo, either or both of them would have been pronounced classic, barring some slight defects in form."
I cannot stop to quote from the delightful reports of the lives and works of Albert Matson, George D. Tufts, D. O. Loy, Lavinia Pascoe Oblad, and forty or fifty other American singers, but it seems to me, Mencken, that I have submitted enough evidence to prove to you that the great book on American music has been written. Without one single mention of the names of Ho-
