"It [the ghost] took, for some moments, no more apparent heed of him, than he of it. The Christmas Waits were playing somewhere in the distance, and, through his thoughtfulness, he seemed to listen to the music. It seemed to listen too."
from "The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain", a short story by Charles Dickens (1848).
"As I passed along the High Street, I heard the Waits at a distance,
and struck off to find them. They were playing near one of the old
gates of the City, at the corner of a wonderfully quaint row of red-
brick tenements, which the clarionet obligingly informed me were
inhabited by the Minor-Canons. They had odd little porches over the
doors, like sounding-boards over old pulpits; and I thought I should
like to see one of the Minor-Canons come out upon his top stop, and
favour us with a little Christmas discourse about the poor scholars
of Rochester; taking for his text the words of his Master relative
to the devouring of Widows' houses.
The clarionet was so communicative, and my inclinations were (as
they generally are) of so vagabond a tendency, that I accompanied
the Waits across an open green called the Vines, and assisted--in
the French sense--at the performance of two waltzes, two polkas, and
three Irish melodies, before I thought of my inn any more. However,
I returned to it then, and found a fiddle in the kitchen, and Ben,
the wall-eyed young man, and two chambermaids, circling round the
great deal table with the utmost animation."
From "The Seven Poor Travellers", a short story by Charles Dickens, published 1854
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