at the side of the hall play a succession of lively melodies on their peculiar musical instruments, which are on the principle of our glass and metal accordions or musical glasses, the notes being elicited by sharp taps administered with a small hammer. The thin notes producible from the corresponding instruments at home give no idea of the full volume of sound emitted by the musical instruments of Colymbia, where, indeed, music is cultivated to a much higher degree and much more universally than it is with us.
It is well known that sonorous bodies, though they retain their pitch or timbre when struck under water lose much of their sonorousness. The sound is not prolonged as in air but abruptly cut short as when the damper is applied to the strings of the piano. The ingenuity of the Colymbians has enabled them to overcome this defect, and to give to every note any amount of prolongation required. Unless they had been able to accomplish this their music would have been absolutely expressionless; whereas, on the contrary, it abounds in the most exquisite cadences, and even their ordinary instruments are capable of calling forth an amount of expression and feeling in the notes they produce that is scarcely to be matched by the finest performances on our own wind and stringed instruments.
The company begins to arrive simultaneously with the striking up of the music. The sole garment of the gentlemen is of gayer colours than that usually worn by them in the daytime, and the ladies are further decorated with necklaces of pearls or beautiful shells. The same ornaments are intertwined with the plaits of their hair, and they have armlets and
