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Burlington, Vermont. Friday, June 26, z84o. This pretty country village was aglow in the setting sun as the steamboat Burlington rounded Sharpshin Point from Plattsburgh. From the unfinished breakwater we viewed a mass of foliage covering the slope above the three long wharves, the dwellings showing through as bright spots of white clapboard, red brick and a little yellow. Northward from the docks the shoreline rises to a bluff, behind which a wisp of furnace smoke, a white steeple, and a square, gray limestone belfry mark the northern extent of the village, and the woods meet the water beyond. The college dome crowns the crest of the hill, and eastward, the green fades into the hazy blue of Camel's Rump and Mansfield mountains. We turned to drink in the sunset and the

AT mid-century in Vermont, music as distinguished from folk singing, which had had a vigorous life since early settlement, was beginning to be made and listened to for its own sake, and to have as secure a place in secular gatherings as in the church. Traveling musical companies began to compete successfully with other kinds of shows. Occasionally one of their members would detach himself from the troupe and set himself up in a town as a musical jack-of-all-trades. He often provided the leadership for the local amateur choruses and such musical conventions as took place near by, as well as for the brass bands which developed with the martial spirit preceding the Civil War. Village jewelers and watchmakers began to deal in musical instruments, and with the booksellers, to serve as agents for the itinerants. Concert handbills and programs were prepared by the local printers, who occasionally published the teachers' efforts at dance music or sacred composition. The changes in the social history of music in this period took place in the larger towns, along the railroads which tied them to the large cities. For two bits, barnstorming companies operating out of New York and Boston offered the following attractions: plays; panoramas and dioramas of New York City, Civil War battle scenes or the Holy Land; readings; comic dialogues; ventriloquists; prestidigitators; contortionists; gymnasts; glassblowers; Wild Men of Borneo; Siamese twins-and concerts. Most of these shows had their musical interludes or accompaniments. The usual concert was a show with a large proportion of music. Audiences were more taken by the novel and comic than by the musical.