hamber which sufficed sixty years
ago for the small company which then composed the student body.
At either end above the floor-space was a gallery. One fronted the
pulpit, curving widely and arranged with pews for the accommodation
of the professors and their families. Opposite this was the choir loft
over the preacher's head, a smaller gallery containing the strident
old-fashioned reed organ, and seats for the dozen or so who made up
the college choir. Places in the choir were much sought after, for
a student could stretch his legs and indulge in a comfortable yawn
unmolested by the scrutiny of the proctors who kept a sharp watch
on their brethren on the settees below. The professors brought their
families, and the daughters were sometimes pretty. Behind the green
curtains of the choir loft one could scan to his heart's content quite
unobserved the beauties at their devotions. The college choir of
my time contained sometimes boys who had interesting careers. The
organist who, while he manipulated the keys, growled at the same time
an abysmal bass, afterward became a zealous Catholic, dying in Rome as
Chamberlain in the Vatican of Pope Leo XIII. Horace Howard Furness
was the principal stay of the treble, his clear, strong voice carrying
far; my function was to afford to him a rather uncertain support. My
voice was not of the best nor was my ear quite sure. I ventured
once to criticise a fellow-singer as being off the _pitch_; he
retorted that I was _tarred_ from the same stick and he proved it
true, but there we sang together above the heads of venerable men who
preached. They were good men, sometimes great scholars, but the
ears they addressed were not always willing. A somewhat machine-like
sermoniser who, it was irreverently declared, ran as if wound up but
sometimes slipped a cog, had been known to pray "that the intemperate
might become temperate, the intolerant tolerant, the industrious
dustrious." Longfellow always came with his beautiful wife, the
heroine of _Hyperion_, whose tragic fate a few years later
shocked the world. He used to sit withdrawn into the corner of his
high-backed pew, separated from us in the choir loft by only a short
intervening space, motionless, absorbed in some far-away thought.
Though his eyes were sometimes closed I knew that he was not asleep;
what could be the topic on which his meditation was so intent? Not
long after _Hiawatha_ appeared, and I shall always believe that
in those Su