EDGAR, THE CHOIR BOY UNCELESTIAL

You all know how they look in the pictures—enlarged photogravures, mostly: they have appealing violet eyes and drooping mouths and oval faces. They tip their heads back and to the side, and there is usually a broad beam of light falling across their little official nighties. People frame them in Flemish oak and hang them over the piano, and little girls long to resemble them.

But Edgar was not that kind. So greatly did he differ, in fact, that even the choirmaster, who ought to have known better, was deceived, and discovered him with difficulty. When that gentleman confronted them in the parish house, a mob of suspicious little boys, shoving, growling, snickering, and otherwise fulfilling their natures, he promptly selected Tim Mullaly, who possessed to an amazing degree the violet eyes and thedrooping mouth and the oval face, as his first soprano. The choirmaster was young in years and his profession.

But Tim refused to sing the scale alone, and as the others scorned to accompany him in this exercise, Mr. Fellowes, determinedly patient, suggested in the hilarious “come-on-boys!” fashion consecrated to childhood by adults, that they should all join in some popular melody, to limber them up and dispel their uneasiness.

“But Tim refused to sing the scale alone.”

“What shall we sing?” he called out breezily, from the piano-stool, faintly indicating a “ragtime” rhythm with his left hand, still facing them as he searched the forbidding countenances before him for a gleam of friendship.

After all, they were human boys, and they could all sing after a fashion, or they would not have been induced by relatives who had read the qualifications for choir membership to attend this trying function.

“’Hot time!’” burst from one of the youngsters.

“All right!” and the inviting melody drew them in; soon they were shouting lustily. Raucous altos, nasal sopranos, fatal attempts to compass a bass—at any rate, they were started. The verse was over, the chorus had begun, when a sudden sound sent the choirmaster’s heart to his throat, his hands left the keys. Into the medley of coarse, boyish shouting dropped a silvery thread of purest song, a very bird-note. For a moment it flowed on the level of the chorus, then suddenly, with an indescribable leap, a slurringrush, it rose to an octave above and led them all. The choirmaster twirled around on the stool.

“Who’s that? Which boy is singing up there?” he demanded excitedly. There was no reply. They grinned consciously at each other; one could imagine them all guilty.

“Come, come, boys! Don’t be silly—who was it?”

Silence, of the most sepulchral sort. Mr. Fellowes shrugged his shoulders, swung round again, and started the second verse. They dashed through it noisily; he picked out here and there a sweet little treble, one real alto. But his ears were pricked for something better, and presently it came. The rhythm was too enticing.

“Please, oh, please, oh, don’t you let me fall——”

“By George, he’s a human blackbird!”

“You’re all mine, an’ I love you best of all——”

“That’s high C!”

“An you mus’ be my man, ’r I’ll have no man at all——”

The choirmaster burst into a joyous if somewhat reedy tenor.

“There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night!”

He whirled about, still singing, and caught the ecstatic, dreamy gaze of Tim Mullaly.

“It’s you!” he cried, pouncing on him. Tim giggled feebly.

“Yessir,” he said.

“Now sing this scale, and I’ll give you five cents.”

An envious sigh quavered through the parish hall.

Tim threw back his head and opened his drooping mouth.

“Do, re——”

There was a flash of blue gingham, a snarl of rage, a sound as of fifty pounds of small boy suddenly seated on the floor.

“Where’s yer fi’ cents?” a new voice inquired easily.

The choirmaster perceived with amazement that the owner of the voice, a freckled boy with an excessivelyretroussénose, was sitting on the prostrate Tim.

“What is the meaning of this? Get up!” he said sternly. “What’s your name? I can’t have any of this sort of thing in my choir!”

The freckled boy did not rise. In fact, he seated himself more comfortably on Master Mullaly, and demanded again:

“Where’s yer fi’ cents?”

“’Where’s yer fi’ cents?’”

The choirmaster stepped forward and seized the offender’s collar. As his fingers tightened, the captive burst into the chorus of the moment before—it was the blackbird voice! So obstinate was the choirmaster’s first impression that he looked instinctively at the fallen Tim to catch the notes, but Tim was struggling meekly but firmly for breath, and this free trilling came from above him. The choirmaster relaxed his hold.

“It was you all the time!” he said in a stupor of surprise.

“Yep,” replied the singer, “it was me. Did yer think it was him?” with a slight jounce to indicate his victim.

“Get up, won’t you, and sing me something else,” the choirmaster urged. The boy rose promptly.

“What’ll I sing?” he returned amicably. There had been a different tone in the choirmaster’s voice.

“Happy Home! Happy Home!” the crowd demanded. They had stood to one side in the most neutral manner during the brief struggle that had laid Tim low, and listened respectfully to the brief colloquy that followed. It was evident that past experience had suggested this attitude on their part.

The choirmaster looked relieved. He had no narrow prejudices, but he realized that a hymn like “My Happy Home” comes with good effect from the parish-hall windows.

“Where’s your mouth organ?” demanded thefreckled one of a larger boy in the crowd. The latter promptly produced the instrument in question, cuddled it in both hands a moment after the fashion of the virtuoso, and drew forth the jerky and complex series of strains peculiar to it. It was evidently a prelude—a tune vaguely familiar to the choirmaster. Suddenly the boy’s voice burst into this sombre background:

“I’d leave my yappy yome fer you,Oo-oo-oo-oo!”

“I’d leave my yappy yome fer you,

Oo-oo-oo-oo!”

“’I’d leave my yappy yome fer you, Oo-oo-oo-oo!’”

The choirmaster sighed ecstatically. A voice so tender, so soft, so rich in appealing inflections he had never heard. The repeated vowels cooed, they caressed, they allured.

“You’re the nices’ man n’ I ever knoo,Oo-oo-oo-oo!”

“You’re the nices’ man n’ I ever knoo,

Oo-oo-oo-oo!”

If you remember how Madame Melba cooes, “Edgardo! Edgardo-o-o!” when she sings the mad scene from “Lucia,” you will have an ideaof the liquid, slipping notes of that snub-nosed, freckled boy.

“What’s your name?” asked the choirmaster respectfully.

It appeared at first to be Egg-nog, but resolved into Edgar Ogden under careful cross-examination, and its owner agreed to attend three weekly rehearsals and two Sunday services for the princely salary of twenty-five cents a week, the same to be increased in proportion to his progress.

Subsequent efforts proved that it was utterly hopeless to attempt to teach him to read music. When Tim Mullaly and the stupidest alto in the United States—as the choirmaster assured him—could stumble through what was considerately known as a duet at sight, and that was the work of many months, Edgar was still learning his solos by ear. It was wasted effort to insist, and the choirmaster spent long hours and nearly wore his forefinger to the bone, fixing in his pupil’s mind the succession of notes in anthems andTe Deums. Once learned, however, he neverforgot them, and Mr. Fellowes thrilled with pride as the silver stream of his voice flowed higher, higher, above the organ, beyond the choir at his side, till the people in the church sighed and craned their necks to look at the wonderful boy.

“As a matter of fact, they looked, most of them, at Tim.”

As a matter of fact, they looked, most of them, at Tim Mullaly, who, fresh from his Saturday bath, in his little cassock and cotta, realized the dreams of the most exigent lithographer. He stood next to Edgar, and owing to a certain weakness of mind invariably followed with his lips the entire libretto, so to speak, of the work in hand. As his appealing expression and violet eyes were undetachable, he had all the effect of the soloist, and received most of the credit from that vast majority who fail to distinguish one little boy, like one Chinaman, from another, unless he possessessome such salient feature as Tim’s pleading gaze.

This little apprehension was mercifully unsuspected by Edgar, otherwise it is to be feared that the services of a physician would have been required in the Mullaly household. Not that Edgar had any professional pride in his voice. He possessed, according to his own ideas, many more valuable and decorative qualities. His power of song was entirely hereditary, and came to him from his father, who was of English descent. The elder Mr. Ogden, whom rumor reported to run frequent risks of being bitten like a serpent and stung like an adder at the last, had mounted to a dizzy height in the Knights of Pythias entirely through his voice, a sweet and powerful tenor, and was accustomed to spend the greater part of his time in committing to memory and practising dramatic songs of a highly moral variety with choruses on this order:

“‘You lie! I saw you steal that ace!’A crashing blow right in the face—A pistol shot and death’s disgraceWas in that pack of cards!”

“‘You lie! I saw you steal that ace!’

A crashing blow right in the face—

A pistol shot and death’s disgrace

Was in that pack of cards!”

At the proper point, a friend in another room would shoot off a blank cartridge to a stormy accompaniment on the Pythian piano, and the Knights would become so appreciative that the soloist, to borrow a classical phrase, rarely got home until morning. What time Mr. Ogden found himself able to spare from getting up his repertoire was judiciously employed in borrowing money for the purchase of new articles of regalia, for with the Pythians to rise was to shine.

His elder son Samuel, familiarly known as Squealer, inherited both his father’s tendencies, and was in great demand among the saloons and pool-rooms, where he sang ballads of a tender and moral nature, dealing mostly with the Home, and the sanctity of the family relation in general. One of these in especial, in which Squealer assumed a hortatory attitude and besought an imaginary parent to “take her back, Dad,” adding in a melting baritone,

“She’s my mother and your wife!”

so affected a certain bar-roomhabitué, whose habit of chasing his family through the tenementwith a carving-knife had led them to move out of town, that he had been known to lay his head on the bar and weep audibly.

It was a moot point among his friends as to which was Squealer’s realchef d’œuvre, the song just mentioned or another which ran,

“You’ll only have one mother, boy,You can’t treat her too well!”

“You’ll only have one mother, boy,

You can’t treat her too well!”

Very often after singing this Squealer would become too affected to endure the thought of what the song described as “the old home, empty now,” and would repair to some scene which drew less heavily on the emotions, thus assuring a sleepless if wrathful night to Mrs. Ogden, and fluent altercation on his return to the old home.

Mrs. Ogden was not musical herself, and devoted most of her energies to fine laundry work, a less emotional but more lucrative occupation. Edgar’s professional duties interested her chiefly by reason of the weekly salary, now grown to fifty cents, of which one-tenth was allowed him for his private purse, the remainder being appliedto the very obvious necessities of the household. His consequent position as wage-earner was firmly established, and his mother, though she cherished a natural contempt for the mental calibre of any young man who considered Edgar’s voice worth fifty cents a week, saw to it that so remunerative an organ received all the consideration it deserved.

“Shiny storm rubbers were urged upon the artist’s reluctant feet.”

To Mr. Ogden’s undisguised horror, two new suits of under flannels were purchased at the beginningof the winter, and shiny storm rubbers were urged upon the artist’s reluctant feet on every slushy day. The most unconvincing cough was rewarded with black licorice, purchased from the general household fund, and when Edgar had the measles, the Prince of Wales, to use Mr. Ogden’s irritated phrase, might have been glad to taste the mutton broth and cocoa that fattened that impudent kid.

“She was not in the habit of applying her disciplinary measures to the throat.”

Nor was her system limited to this soft indulgence,as the occasion of one of the choirmaster’s visits proved. Fearful lest the purpose of his call should become evident too abruptly, he began by one of his customary eulogies of his first soprano’s voice. She received his enthusiasm coldly, indicated forcibly her own lack of musical ability, and boasted, with a pride inexplicable to one who has not been accustomed to consider this gift synonymous with penitentiary qualifications, that she could not carry a tune. On his mentioning somewhat diffidently that Edgar’s fines for tardiness, absence, etc., must in the nature of things make appreciable inroads upon his salary, the interview assumed a different aspect.

Wiping her hands on her apron, Mrs. Ogden assured the choirmaster that if Edgar wasn’t earning his wages she’d attend to that part of it, all right. So intent was her expression that he felt obliged to put in a plea for gentleness, on the ground that such a delicate mechanism as the human throat could not be too carefully treated. Mrs. Ogden assured him that she was not in the habit of applying her disciplinarymeasures to the throat, and the audience was at an end. The day happened to be Saturday, and at the evening rehearsal it seemed to the choirmaster that things had never gone so smoothly. After all, he thought, it needed a mother to reason with the boys—he had made several calls of the same nature that week—a mother knew best how to influence them. And he was abundantly justified in his conclusions.

“A mild and stolid youth.”

On Sunday afternoon Edgar marched into the church, impassive and uninteresting to the outward vision, with Tim beside him, rapt and effective. Edgar stared vacantly into space, his feet marked the time at the proper distance from the crucifer, a mild and stolid youth, who could never understand why it was that just as he turned the cornerand began to climb the steps to the choir-stalls his cassock should suddenly tighten below the knees and almost throw him. Edgar’s partner in the column could have informed him, but prudence rendered him uncommunicative.

“The brightest hopes we cherish here,How fast they tire and faint!”

“The brightest hopes we cherish here,

How fast they tire and faint!”

Edgar’s brows met, he took a longer stride in reaching for his B flat, and the crucifer grasped his pole nervously and broke step a moment—his cassock had caught again.

“How many a spot defiles the robeThat wraps an earthly saint!”

“How many a spot defiles the robe

That wraps an earthly saint!”

“He sings like an angel,” the rector mused. “How clumsy that Waters boy is!”

Once through with the Psalter, which he loathed because he was not always certain of his pointing, and could not endure Tim’s look of horror at his occasional slips, Edgar, having hunched his shoulders at just the angle to prevent the tenor behind him from looking across into the transept, and ostentatiously opened his service attheNunc dimittis, so that Tim might by his innocent nudging and indications of his ownMagnificatpage call a frown and a fine from the choirmaster, devoted himself to a study of the rose-window over the transept.

The decoration of this window was a standing subject of quarrel between him and the first alto, Howard Potter. Edgar had advanced the somewhat untenable proposition that the various figures in the stained-glass windows represented the successive rectors and choirmasters of St. Mark’s. Howard had objected that the dedications under the windows referred (as he had discovered by adroit questions that gave his informants no idea whatever of what he was driving at) to persons who had never held office of any kind in the church.

Edgar had then fallen back on the theory that the figures were portraits of the persons whom the windows commemorated. Howard triumphantly queried why, then, should the legend, “Sacred to the memory of Walter, beloved husband of Mary Bird Ferris,” appear under a tall woman in darkgreen glass with a most feminine amount of hair and a long red sash? Edgar was staggered, but suddenly recalled his father’s glowing account of a costume ball given by the Knights of Pythias, in which many of the Knights appeared in women’s clothes, one in particular, the proprietor of a fish market, having rented a long and flowing wig the better to deceive his fellow-Knights and their delighted guests. This had impressed Edgar as intensely humorous; he greatly enjoyed picturing the scene to his imagination, and he strengthened his wavering infallibility by declaring that the beloved husband of Mary Bird Ferris was beyond doubt a Pythian in costume.

This had silenced Howard for a week, but one afternoon at evensong, just before the electric bell sounded in the robing-room to summon them to the hall, he had rapidly inquired in a hissing whisper, “Who that white puppy carryin’ the flag in the round window on the side, where the bird was, was a picture of?”

The bird was the lectern-eagle, and neither of the antagonists had ever seen a lamb. Edgarhad recognized the fact that it was a poorly drawn puppy, and he did not believe that it could possibly have balanced in one crooked-up knee and at that perilous angle any such banner as the artist had given it. It was also crushingly apparent to him that no Knight of Pythias, with all the assistance in the world, could transform himself into such a woolly, curly, four-legged object as that.

“’Who that white puppy carryin’ the flag ... was.’”

Then why should the brass plate beneath it declare that this rose-window was placed in “loving memory of Alice Helen Worden, who departed this life June nineteenth, eighteen hundred and ninety”? That was no name for a puppy, tobegin with. The whole affair irritated Edgar exceedingly. He saw no explanation whatever. He perceived that he should have to fight the first alto. This was not only a great responsibility in itself, but the necessity of evading the parental eye added to the nervous strain, and the consciousness that on this particular Sunday afternoon Mr. Ogden occupied one of the rear pews, with the idea of seeing how he behaved during service, and subsequently accompanying him home, so weighed upon the spirits of the first soprano that William Waters accomplished the choir steps, in the recessional, without a stumble.

Throughout the service Edgar was as one in a dream. His vision was turned inward, and he even forgot his effective trick of frightening the choirmaster into cold chills by looking vacantly uncertain of the proper moment to take up the choir’s share of the responses. The fact that he invariably came in at the precise beat had never fortified Mr. Fellowes against that nervous shudder as he saw his first soprano’s mouth open hesitatingly two seconds before the time. To-day hewas spared all anxiety. Edgar’s voice and Tim’s eyes were the perfection of tuneful devotion.

“And blèss thine in-hèr-i-tànce!”

they implored softly. Neither of them had the remotest idea what inheritance meant—they would have besought as willingly a blessing for irrelevance or inelegance; but to the assistant clergyman, whose nervous scratching of his nose, while waiting for the alms-basin to reach him, was to Edgar and Tim as definite and eagerly awaited a part of the service as any other detail, the slow-syllabled Gregorian cadence brought the word in a sudden new light and he made it the text for a sermon so successful as to get him, a little later, a parish of his own. This leads us to many interesting conclusions, musical and other.

The rector noticed with pleasure the seedy-looking man in the back of the church: he was just then smarting a little under the accusation of “aristocratic tendencies”: a body of conservatives had never approved of the boy-choir. He hoped to get the man into the Brotherhood of St.Andrew, if he were allied to no other organization.

Mr. Ogden, as we know, was on business of his own—business that kept him glaring fixedly in the rector’s direction, which encouraged that good man still further. It is to be doubted if the Brotherhood would have appealed to him, however. Not that he would have been hindered by any narrow sectarian tendencies. Mrs. Ogden, who did up the shirt-waists of the Presbyterian minister’s daughter, was by her presented regularly with a missionary bank in the form of apapier-machécottage with a chimney imitating red brick; and Edgar, employing a Napoleonic strategy, triumphantly attended the Methodist Christmas festivals and the Baptist Sunday-school picnics, the latter society offering a merry-go-round on a larger scale, the former providing the infant faithful with more practicable presents and larger candy-bags. Squealer, moreover, had sung “The Holy City” more than once for the Congregational Christian Endeavor Society, so that Mr. Ogden felt, with a certain justice, that hischurch connection did him credit on the whole, and excused himself from any undue energy in that direction.

He watched his son keenly, but Edgar’s ecclesiastical demeanor was without a flaw. Moreover, his plans were gradually maturing. He sangAmenat proper intervals and by a process of unconscious cerebration managed to get between the organist and the tenor, who depended on Mr. Fellowes to mark the time for him with his left hand, and in consequence of being unable to see him, bungled his offertory solo; but his thoughts were otherwhere. He had decided to slip out of the south transept door, thus eluding parental pursuit, and fight Howard Potter in his own back yard before he slept. He would practise upon his victim a recent scientific acquisition proudly styled by him “the upper-cut,” which he had learned from an acquaintance at the cost of ten cents and three sugar-cookies.

At this point the anthem-prelude drew him to his feet. He had saved his voice, according to directions, for his solo, and in the waiting hushevery word flowed, soft and pure, to the end of the church.

“Mercy and truth, mercy and truth, mercy—” Ah, that exquisite soft swoop downward! The organ rippled on contentedly, a continuation of Edgar’s flutelike tones—“and truth are me-et together!” There was all the richness of a woman’s voice, all the passionless clearness of a boy’s, all the morning innocence of a child’s.

It occurred to him suddenly that the north transept would be safer—it was on the side farthest from home.

“Righteousness and peace, righteousness and peace have kissèd each other!”

He wondered if Howard had learned the upper-cut since their last encounter.

Tim’s face was as the face of an angel; a long slanting ray from the rose-window fell across his curls.

“Have kissèd each other,” Edgar sighed softly. “Have kissèd each other—” the caressing tones melted into the organ’s, whispered once more, “each other,” and died lingeringly. A longbreath, an audible “Ah-h-h!” drifted through the church. The choirmaster kicked his feet together under the organ for joy. He little knew that at that very moment the future of his vested choir was swinging lightly in the balance.

But such was the fact. Fate, who links together events seemingly isolated, smoothed Edgar’s way to his fight, but allowed him to be beaten. If this had not happened, his wrath would not have vented itself in hectoring a bad-tempered bass at the Wednesday rehearsal, by scampering in front of him and mimicking with wonderful accuracy his gruff, staccato voice.

“He taketh up the isles—as a ver-ry—little thing!” mocked Edgar.

“Shut up!” growled the bass.

“A ver-ry lit-tle thing!” Edgar continued malignantly, slipping across his victim’s path.

“Oh, all right, young feller!” called the bass, enraged at the grins and applause of the other men, “all right! Just you wait till Sunday, that’s all!” If Edgar had not teased him so, hewould not have added: “I know what’ll happen then, if you don’t.”

“’You’re going to be bounced, that’s what.’”

“What?” Edgar inquired derisively, catching up with him.

“You’re going to be bounced, that’s what,” said the bass irritably.

“Aw, come off! I ain’t either!”

“Well, you ought to be, the whole pack of you,” the bass continued decidedly. “Bag and baggage! And a good riddance, too. No choirboy camping-outthissummer!”

Edgar dropped behind and mused. “Who told yer?” he called.

“Ask Fellowes—and if he don’t lick you, I will!” retorted the bass, making a quick grab, which Edgar easily evaded.

He summoned his mates immediately; the question was laid before them. Had they heard that they were to be bounced? Did they believe that the two weeks’ camping-out, the object of all their endurance and loyalty, the prize of their high calling, was to be discontinued? Tim was deputed to inquire on Saturday afternoon. He returned disconsolate; they shoved each other significantly.

“What’d he say? What’d he say?”

“He says mos’ prob’ly not. Says it costs too much. Says maybe a picnic——”

“Aw! old chump! Goin’ to bounce us, too?”

“I dunno. I guess so. I didn’t ask him that. I just says to him, ‘Aw, say, Mr. Fellowes, ain’t us boys goin’ campin’?’ An’ he says, ‘I guess not this year, Tim, mos’ prob’ly. Maybe a picnic——”

“’Well, I bet he don’t bounce me!’”

“Well, I bet he don’t bounce me! I betcher that, I betcher, now!”

Edgar strutted before them. They regarded him with interest.

“Whatcher goin’ to do?” they asked respectfully.

“What’ll I do? I’ll—I’ll bounce myself!” he called over his shoulder, as he strode home.

His moody air during supper convinced Mr. Ogden that something was up. Ever since he had discovered Edgar’s demand for an additional ten cents a Sunday, on the ground that his mother thought him worth more, and his later daring strike for five cents further salary, which the choirmaster had innocently considered abundantly justified and paid out of his own pocket, Mr. Ogden, who, having heard rumors of wild dissipations in the peanut and root-beer line, had pounced upon his son returning plethoric from pay day, and promptly annexed the extra fifteen cents, was convinced of the necessity of surveillance for this wily wage-earner, and formed the habit of escorting him regularly on pay nights, alone at first, later assisted by Mrs. Ogden, who accompanied the family group as a self-constituted and final auditor. It has frequently been remarked that a great grief may bind together once disunited members of a family; it is extremely improbable that any affliction whatever could have produced amongthe Ogdens such a gratifyingesprit de corpsas resulted from their unfeigned interest in pay day. But when Mr. Ogden had shadowed his son to no more secluded and dangerous spot than the church-yard, and saw him in earnest conclave with his attentive mates, he went, relieved, about his own business, reassured by the words “campin’ out” and “Sunday afternoon,” that he caught from behind a convenient tombstone. He was utterly unconscious that the scene he had left was far more menacing to his household than even the most disfiguring fight of his warlike son’s varied repertoire. But so it was. Haranguing, promising, taunting, threatening, Edgar led them, finally subdued, into one of the most satisfactory rehearsals of the year.

They waited till quarter of eleven on Sunday, and finally the men marched in alone, somewhat conscious and ill at ease, followed by a red-faced, determined rector, and a puzzled visiting clergyman. They sang “O happy band of pilgrims,” but it was remarked by the wondering congregationthat they did not look happy themselves. There was no music but the hymns, which, as they had been altered to well-known numbers, were chanted lustily by the inhabitants of the pews, thus winning the sincere admiration of the visiting clergyman.

“And made a speech that will adorn the parish annals for many a year.”

“Really, such well-trained congregational singingis quite rare,” he remarked afterward to the rector, and was somewhat surprised at the short answer: “It shall certainly never occur again.”

It had gone hard with the vested choir but for Mrs. Ogden. Mr. Fellowes pleaded in vain; in vain the Ladies’ Auxiliary passed resolutions; the rector was firm. It was only when Mrs. Ogden swept in upon him in his study, a chastened, still apprehensive boy under one arm, followed by half a dozen women similarly equipped, and made a speech that will adorn the parish annals for many a year, that he yielded, respectfully convinced.

Edgar had met his Waterloo, and lived, so to speak, under a consequent military surveillance, with much of his prestige gone, his pay docked for a month, and the certainty of approaching warm weather, when it would be impossible to take cold, and nothing but a summons to the choir invisible could excuse him from rehearsals here, to render the future all too clear to him. In the words of the processional,

“His tongue could never tireOf singing with the choir.”

“His tongue could never tire

Of singing with the choir.”

To-day, if you should attend evensong at St. Mark’s, you will beyond a doubt be delighted with a silver voice that appears to proceed from a violet-eyed boy with a sweet expression.

“It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord!” the voice declares melodiously, but it is doubtful if its owner is in a thankful frame of mind. He would in all probability prefer to be with his brother Samuel, who is at present touring the West triumphantly with a Methodist revivalist, rendering “Where is my wandering boy to-night?” to weeping congregations for ten dollars a week and his traveling expenses. And even this success leaves Squealer dissatisfied; he would far rather be in his father’s position—first tenor in the Denman Thompson Old Homestead Quartette—and sing “The Palms” behind the scenes, when the stereopticon vision of the repentant prodigal thrills the audience.

It would seem that your artistic temperamentis doomed to discontent. Whereas Mrs. Ogden, who cannot carry a tune, is perfectly satisfied with fine laundry work.

“Perfectly satisfied with fine laundry work.”

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