mother, Mr. Barrett, and myself to the famous cemetery.

I don't know that I ever heard anyone sing Irish and Scottish ballads
more tenderly, more pathetically than did Joe Barrett, and as my mother
was very fond of old songs, he used to sit and sing one after another for
her. That day there was no one in the crawling little car but we three,
and presently he began to sing. But, oh, what was it that he sang? Irish,
unmistakably--a lament, rising toward its close into the _keen_ of some
clan. It wrung the very heart.

"Don't!" I exclaimed. My mother's face was turned away, my throat ached,
even Joe's eyes had filled. "What is it?" I asked.

"I don't know its name," he answered, "I have always put it on programmes
as 'A Lament.' I learned it from an Irish emigrant-lad, who was from the
North, and who was dying fast from consumption and home-hunger. Is not
that wail chilling? As he gave the song it seemed like a message from the
dying."

At the end of our stroll among the flowers and trees and past those
strange stone structures that look so like serious-minded bake-ovens,
having to wait for a car, we sat on a stone bench, and in that quiet city
of the dead Joe's voice rose, tenderly reverent, in that simple air that
was yet an anguish of longing, followed by a wail for the dead.

My mother wept silently. I said, softly: "It's a plaint and a farewell,"
and Joe brought his eyes back from the great cross, blackly silhouetted
against the flaming sky, and slowly said: "Beloved among women, it is a
message--a message from the dying or the dead, believe that."

And a time came when--well, when _almost_ I did believe that.

Later on, when Mr. Barrett stood second only to Mr. Booth in his
profession, well established, well off, well dressed, polished and
refined of manner, aye, and genial, too, to those he liked, I came by
accident upon a most gracious act of his and, following it up, found him
deep in a conspiracy to deceive a stricken woman into receiving the aid
her piteous determination to stand alone made impossible to offer openly.
I looked at the generous, prosperous, intellectual, intensely active
gentleman, surrounded by clever wife and the pretty, thoroughly educated
daughters, who were chaperoned in all their walks to and from park or
music-lesson or shopping-trip, and I wondered at the distance little
"Larry," with the heavy head and frail body, had traveled, and bowed
respectfully to such magnificent energy.