about the Irish. For an instant, the sight of it made him shiver, as if
the sunny May had of a sudden lapsed back into bleak December. Then he
smiled, and the bad vision went off into space. He saw instead Father
Forbes, in the white and purple vestments, standing by poor MacEvoy's
bedside, with his pale, chiselled, luminous, uplifted face, and he
heard only the proud, confident clanging of the girl's recital,--BEATUM
MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, PETRUM ET
PAULUM--EM!--AM!--UM!--like strokes on a great resonant alarm-bell,
attuned for the hearing of heaven. He caught himself on the very verge
of feeling that heaven must have heard.

Then he smiled again, and laid the matter aside, with a parting
admission that it had been undoubtedly picturesque and impressive, and
that it had been a valuable experience to him to see it. At least the
Irish, with all their faults, must have a poetic strain, or they would
not have clung so tenaciously to those curious and ancient forms. He
recalled having heard somewhere, or read, it might be, that they were
a people much given to songs and music. And the young lady, that very
handsome and friendly Miss Madden, had told him that she was a musician!
He had a new pleasure in turning this over in his mind. Of all the
closed doors which his choice of a career had left along his pathway, no
other had for him such a magical fascination as that on which was graven
the lute of Orpheus. He knew not even the alphabet of music, and his
conceptions of its possibilities ran but little beyond the best of the
hymn-singing he had heard at Conferences, yet none the less the longing
for it raised on occasion such mutiny in his soul that more than once he
had specifically prayed against it as a temptation.

Dangerous though some of its tendencies might be, there was no
gainsaying the fact that a love for music was in the main an uplifting