, becoming a placable, easily pleased,
domesticated creature at once.

"Got Nellie to sleep again, have you?" he said, putting his hand on her
shoulder. "Well, let's go in and have some music. Come and sing 'The Last
Rose of Summer.' That's my favourite; it beats all the new-fangled opera
things all to pieces."

He led the way into the parlour, which was a large square room, regarded
by Barnesville as the most sumptuous of reception chambers, inasmuch as
its floor was covered by a Brussels carpet adorned with exotics of
multifarious colours, its walls ornamented with massively framed
photographs, and its corners fitted up with whatnots and shining
hair-cloth seats known in Hamlin County as "tater-tates," and in that
impressive character admired beyond expression. Its crowning glory,
however, was the piano, which had belonged to Jenny Rutherford in her
boarding-school days, and was the delight of the Judge's heart. It
furnished him with his most cherished recreation in his hours of repose
from political conflict and argument, inasmuch as he regarded his wife's
performance seldom to be equalled and never surpassed, and the soft,
pleasant voice with which she sang "The Last Rose of Summer" and other
simple and sentimental melodies as that of a cantatrice whose renown
might have been world-wide if she had chosen to turn her attention to its
development.

"Lord!" he said, throwing himself into one of the shining arm-chairs.
"There's nothing like music, nothing under the shining sun. 'Music hath
charms to soothe the savage breast.'"

This in his most sonorous quotation tones: "Let a man get tired or out of
sorts, or infernal mad at a pack of cursed fools, and music's the thing
that'll set him straight every time, if he's any sort of a fellow. A man
that ain't fond of music ain't of any account on God's green earth. I
wouldn't trust him beyond a broom-straw. There's a mean streak in a man
that don't care for music, sure. Why, the time the Democrats elected
Peyton, the only thing that saved me from bursting a blood-vessel was
Jenny's playing 'My Lodging's on the Cold Ground' with variations. I
guess she played it for two hours hand-running, because when I found it
was sort of soothing me, I didn't want her to break in on the effect by
beginning another. Play it for Tom, Jenny, after you've sung awhile.
There's one thing I've made up my mind to--if I had fifty girls, I'd have
'em all learn music if they didn't know anything-