To-day, however, from the first chord I had felt a change for the worse,
a sinister change. During vespers it had been chiefly the chancel organ
which supported the beautiful choir, but now and again, quite wantonly as
it seemed, from the west gallery where the great organ stands, a heavy
hand had struck across the church at the serene peace of those clear
voices. It was something more than harsh and dissonant, and it betrayed
no lack of skill. As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of
what my architect's books say about the custom in early times to
consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being
finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing
at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabe, and
whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian
church might have entered undetected and taken possession of the west
gallery. I had read of such things happening, too, but not in works on
architecture.

Then I remembered that St. Barnabe was not much more than a hundred years
old, and smiled at the incongruous association of mediaeval superstitions
with that cheerful little piece of eighteenth-century rococo.

But now vespers were over, and there should have followed a few quiet
chords, fit to accompany meditation, while we waited for the sermon.
Instead of that, the discord at the lower end of the church broke out
with the departure of the clergy, as if now nothing could control it.

I belong to those children of an older and simpler generation who do not
love to seek for psychological subtleties in art; and I have ever refused
to find in music anything more than melody and harmony, but I felt that
in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that instrument there was
something being hunted. Up and down the pedals chased him, while the