John Higginbotham, with his unfailing insurance eye, pointed out that
the stove-pipe wire had sagged, bringing the pipe perilously near the
woodwork, and then gossiped about the robberies his company had
suffered. A game of rhymes was proposed. In this one person gives a word
and the next to him must at once match it with an appropriate rhyme.
This diversion met with little enthusiasm and the party lagged until
some one suggested that Jim recite. He chose a poem from Browning, "How
They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." He put his very soul in
those galloping horses and wondered why the poet said so much about the
men and so little about the steeds. Dr. Jebb could not quite "see the
lesson," but the fire and power of the rendering gripped the audience.
Dr. Carson said, "Now you're doing real stuff! If you'd cut out all your
piffling goody talk and give us life like that, you'd have all the town
with you."

Lou-Jane was actually moved, and Belle glowed with pride to see her hero
really touching the nobler strings of human emotion--strings that such a
community is apt to lose sight of under cobwebs of long disuse but they
are there and ready to resound to the strong, true soul that can touch
them with music.

But what was it in the trampling horses that stirred some undiscovered
depth in his own heart? How came it that those lines drove fogbanks back
and showed another height in his soul, a high place never seen before,
even by himself? And, as those simple townfolk, stirred they knew not
how, all clamoured for another song, he felt the thrill that once was
his in the far-off stable yard of Links, when Denny Denard, brandishing
a dung-fork, chanted "The Raiding of Aymal." Now it all came back and
Hartigan shouted out the rede:

"Haakon is dead! Haakon is dead!
Haakon of the bronze-hilt sword is dead.
His son's in his stead;
Aymal, tall son of Haakon,
Swings now the bronze-hilt sword of his father.
He is gone to the High-fielden
To the high pasture to possess the twelve mares of his father;
Black and bay and yellow, as the herdsman drave them past him;
Black and yellow, their manes on the wind;
And galloped a colt by the side of each."

So he sang in a chant the saga-singer's tale of the king killing all the
colts save one that it might have the nursing of the twelve. His eye
sparkled and glowed; his colour mounted; his soul was so stirred with
the story that his sp