And so the day's
toil was not curtailed; but at the conclusion Miss Musgrave had an
application for instruction in music from every man in the camp, with
one exception. This one defaulter was Euchre Buck. He owned to having
no ear for music--thereby exhibiting more honesty than many of the
others--and confessed to knowing only two tunes, one of which was
"Hail Columbia," and the other--wasn't; and so he said he wanted some
"literary work done." He proposed to Miss Musgrave that she should write
a history of his life at half a guinea a page, thereby--cute Yankee that
he was--thinking to appropriate the whole of her time.
But embarrassed by all these calls upon her, and obviously unable to
satisfy each of them, Miss Musgrave turned for help to the Scholar,
whom she appeared to regard as her special adviser; and he, promising a
solution of the difficulty in half an hour, drew off the whole crowd to
the American Bar, where the question was thrashed out in all its points.
It was clearly evident that Miss Musgrave could not surrender to each
individual the whole of her evening, even if any one had been willing to
let his neighbor monopolise it, which no one was; and therefore it
was necessary to formulate some scheme by which her talents might be
distributed over a larger area.
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