resolve to work every day, at least a little, on the technique. Sickness
and other unavoidable interruptions deprive you of days enough.

Practise always with unexhausted energy: the result will be tenfold. Do
you not frequently use the time for practising, when you have already
been at work studying for five or six hours? Have you then strength and
spirit enough to practise the necessary exercises for an hour or more,
and to study your music-pieces carefully and attentively, as your
teacher instructed you? Is not your mind exhausted, and are not your
hands and fingers tired and stiff with writing, so that you are tempted
to help out with your arms and elbows, which is worse than no practice
at all? But, my dear ladies, if you practise properly, several times
every day, ten minutes at a time, your strength and your patience are
usually sufficient for it; and, if you are obliged to omit your regular
"hour's practice," you have, at any rate, accomplished something with
your ten minutes before breakfast, or before dinner, or at any leisure
moment. So, I beg of you, let me have my minutes.

Practise often, slowly, and without pedal, not only the smaller and
larger études, but also your pieces. In that way you gain, at least, a
correct, healthy mode of playing, which is the foundation of beautiful
playing. Do you do this when neither your teacher, nor your father or
mother is present to keep watch over you? Do you never say, "Nobody is
listening"?

Do you take enough healthy exercise in the open air? Active exercise, in
all weather, makes strong, enduring piano fingers, while subsisting on
indoor-air results in sickly, nervous, feeble, over-strained playing.
Strong, healthy fingers are only too essential for our present style of
piano-playing, which requires such extraordinary execution, and for our