Note 130 — 1854-1856.

Of the connection of the sappers with a service so interesting, the following anecdote is an illustration. A “foreigner of distinction” paid a visit to the Palais de l’Industrie. With Captain Fowke he rambled over the courts, and while the Captain was explaining to him, among other matters, his experiments on the strength of woods, they reached the spot where corporal Mack, in the Captain’s temporary absence, was carrying them on with all the intelligence of a scientific man. A little further on was another sapper. This was sergeant Jenkins, who, for the visitor’s information, cleverly expatiated on some philosophical apparatus in his charge. A red-coat in the building was an object of decided attraction, and the foreigner looked with no little satisfaction at corporal Clabby, who was then making a minute and accurate survey of the position of the cases and objects in the Exhibition. He had scarcely withdrawn his attention from the draughtsman, when a fourth sapper in the person of corporal Key, the indefatigable overseer, came in for a share of the foreigner’s approbation, and he expressed to Captain Fowke his amazement that so many difficult and important duties could, with such efficient results, be intrusted to them. But the measure of his astonishment was not yet full. There was a magnificent organ, built by Bevington and Son, of Greek-street, Soho, in the Palais, which had gained the first-class prize, on which, while the distinguished foreigner was taking his tour, an amateur with a small body and a young and pleasing countenance was performing. Drawn by the power and grandeur of its tones, the Captain and his friend repaired to the compartment where it had a locâle, but on turning the corner, instead of finding, as was expected, a “Maestro,” or “un professeur anglais,” seated before the instrument disporting himself with the hauteur of a musical genius, the foreigner was struck by seeing another sapper, complacently playing with the proficiency and grace of a modest professional. “Mon Dieu!” he cried, as if the varied employments of the British sappers were too exuberant to merit a less startling exclamation, “Encore un sapeur du genie!” And the foreigner went away with a most excited opinion of the talents and attainments of the corps, of which the men above named were the creditable representatives. The military Mozart on this occasion, who strangely enough was named after that “divine composer,” was Ludovico Amedius Woolfgang Hart!—a name due less to his English than his German extraction. As young Hart had opportunity, he applied himself to the great organ with its three rows of keys, pedals, and accessory movements, containing also eighteen hundred and eleven pipes and forty-two stops. His performances comprised selections from Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s Creation, and other oratorios. Once when Her Majesty was passing through the English department he took his place at the instrument, and made the Palais swell with “God save the Queen;” and on another eventful day, when the Emperor of the French was visiting the Exposition, he struck up the national anthem of France—“Partant pour le Syrie.”