So it was that he worried her. He was trying to teach a nightingale to sing by playing the flute to it. But the nightingale sang, in spite of his instruction; the nightingale sang, sang, and longed all the time for the wings of a dove, so that she might fly away and be at rest.
She knew that her father was incapable of understanding her sensitiveness, and she had looked forward to the return of her brother, who might help her father to understand. Alas! the instant she saw that strange light in his eyes she knew that she had nothing to hope for from him. And now she was putting on her clothes to begin another day which should be as all the weary days which had gone before--a day of toiling over exercises with her father at the harpsichord, so that her voice should not be wanting in flexibility when she would appear before an audience in the Assembly Rooms on the evening of the next day.
"Oh for the wings of a dove!" her heart was singing, when, pausing for a moment, with her beautiful hair falling over her shoulders, she heard the strains of her brother's violin floating from the room below. He played the violin beautifully, but.... "Oh for the wings of a dove to fly away and be at rest!"
Mr. Garrick called upon them before they had left the music-room. The children were delighted with Garrick, who could imitate, in such a funny way, their father giving a lesson, and Dr. Johnson assisting by the superiority of his lungs the excellence of his argument on some very delicate question--say, the necessity for building a hospital for spiders which had grown old and past work. This he made the subject of an animated discussion between Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds, keeping the whole family in fits of laughter at Dr. Johnson's polysyllabic references to the industry of the spider, and then bringing tears to their eyes at his picture of the heartlessness of allowing a grey-haired spider to be cast upon the world in its declining years. Of course the children appreciated the ludicrous mistakes made by Sir Joshua, whose infirmity of deafness caused him to assume that Johnson had said exactly the opposite to what he was saying. And then he pretended that he heard a knock at the door. He hastened to admit a gentleman with a very lugubrious face, and before he had opened his mouth there was a cry of "Mr. Cumberland! Mr. Cumberland!" In the truest style of Richard Cumberland, he hastened to decry the whole spider family. Their spinning was grossly overrated, he declared; for his part, he had known many spiders in his time, but he had never known one that was a spinster.