ll, the plain truth is, the youngster was
contemplating his gastric centre, like the monks of Mount Athos, but in
a less happy state of mind than those tranquil recluses, in consequence
of indulgence in the heterogeneous assortment of luxuries procured with
the five-cent piece given him by the kind-hearted old Master. But you
need not think I am going to tell you every time his popgun goes
off, making a Selah of him whenever I want to change the subject.
Occasionally he was ill-timed in his artillery practice and
ignominiously rebuked, sometimes he was harmlessly playful and nobody
minded him, but every now and then he came in so apropos that I am
morally certain he gets a hint from somebody who watches the course of
the conversation, and means through him to have a hand in it and stop
any of us when we are getting prosy. But in consequence of That Boy's
indiscretion, we were without a check upon our expansiveness, and ran on
in the way you have observed and may be disposed to find fault with.

One other thing the Master said before we left the table, after our long
talk of that day.

--I have been tempted sometimes,--said he, to envy the immediate
triumphs of the singer. He enjoys all that praise can do for him and at
the very moment of exerting his talent. And the singing women! Once in
a while, in the course of my life, I have found myself in the midst of
a tulip-bed of full-dressed, handsome women in all their glory, and when
some one among them has shaken her gauzy wings, and sat down before
the piano, and then, only giving the keys a soft touch now and then to
support her voice, has warbled some sweet, sad melody intertwined with
the longings or regrets of some tender-hearted poet, it has seemed to me
that so to hush the rustling of the silks and silence the babble of the
buds, as they call the chicks of a new season, and light up the flame of
romance in cold hearts, in desolate ones, in old burnt-out ones,--like
mine, I was going to say, but I won't, for it isn't so, and you may
laugh to hear me say it isn't so, if you like,--was perhaps better than
to be remembered a few hundred years by a few perfect stanzas, when
your gravestone is standing aslant, and your name is covered over with a
lichen as big as a militia colonel's cockade, and nobody knows or cares
enough about you to scrape it off and set the tipsy old slate-stone
upright again.

--I said nothing in reply to this, for I was thinking of a sweet singer