"The Farmer's Boy," and
joined in the chorus with the remnants of a once mighty voice. After
that he became restless and increasingly snappish; his face darkened at
"Fallen Leaves," and he began to look positively dangerous when a young
man who was a railway porter in town, now home for a holiday, made a
ghastly attempt at merriment by singing a low-class music-hall catch.
What he would have done or said I do not know, for at that moment the
announcement was made which the reader has been expecting--that Mrs.
Abel would give a recitation.

"Now," said Snarley to his neighbour, "we shall have summat like." His
whole being sprang to attention. He rapidly knocked out the ashes of his
pipe, refilled, and lit; and, folding his arms before him on the table,
leant forward to listen. For my part, I took a convenient station where
I could watch Snarley, as Hamlet watched the king in the play. He was
far too intent on Mrs. Abel to notice me.

The barn was dimly lighted, and the speaker, standing far back from the
end of the table, was in deep shadow and almost invisible. Has the
reader ever heard a voice which trembles with emotions gathered up from
countless generations of human experience--a voice in which the memories
of ages, the designs of Nature, the woes and triumphs of evolving worlds
become articulate; a voice that speaks a language not of words, but of
things, transmuting the eternal laws to tones, and pouring into the soul
by their means a stream of solicitations to the secret springs of the
buried life? Such voices there are: Wordsworth heard one of them in the
song of "The Solitary Reaper." In such a voice, rolling forth from the
shadows, and in exquisite articulation, there came to us these words:

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness steals my sense,
As though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains,
One minute past, and Lethewards had sunk."

The noisy crew were hushed: silence fell like a palpable thing. Snarley
Bob shifted his position: he raised his arms from the table, grasped his
chin with his right hand; with his left he took the pipe from his mouth,
and pointed its stem at the speaker; his features relaxed, and then
fixed into the immobility of the worshipping saint.

Observation was difficult; for I, too, was half hypnotised by the voice
from the shadows; but what I remember I will tell.

The voice has now finished the second verse, and is entering the