But if few of our actresses know how to speak, it is at least consoling to see how many women musicians are figuring in the autumn's concerts, singers, pianists, a harpist, violinists and cellists. There is a string quartet, the Whinyates, all women, who have attained real distinction n this most exacting of all forms of music. Yet it is a saddening thought that except as singers (those "fearsome wildfowl" the prime donne) no woman musician has ever got to the front rank. Lady Halle as violinist and Dame Ethel Smyth as composer have come nearest to it, I suppose. But it must be confessed that neither could be mentioned in the same breath with Joachim, Kreisler, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner. It would seem that Nature having constructed woman to perform one miracle greater than. man ever approached was content to let her take second rank to him in other arts, Not, however, in all things. At Bow Street this week one of the musical directors of -the B.B.C., Mr. Hyam Greenbaum, was ¢harged with stealing two books from second-hand bookshops in Charing Cross Road. He picked up a book in one shop, with a bundle of newspapers which he had put down, carried it off to another shop, left it there, and went off with another book. That he had a friend with him at the time, was fairly good presumptive evidence that he had not set out deliberately to steal But much more convincing was the evidence of everyone who knew him, including all the big noises at the B.B.C., that he was the most absent-minded man in London. Only in music he is a whale. Last of the witnesses was his wife. "When he had a cheque book," she said, "he wrote cheques to everybody every day. He is so absent-minded that 1 collect his salary, manage all his money and make him a daily allowance. I have to see that he goes out wearing the right clothes and not wearing odd socks. Last winter I was really annoyed when he lost two chiefs and snuff-boxes, are still there.
Twas a glorious sight to behold the the fair sex A wading with gentlemen up to their necks, wrote a contemporary poet. But the mixed bathing of those days was decidedly voluminous in costume. overcoats and a mackintosh." That was the end of the prosecution and Mr. Greenbaum was led away by his wife, without a stain on his character, smiling amiably.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.