was greatly needed for boots for
the young men. But as Miss Priscilla was a free agent, and quite
determined, he finally decided, like many another leader, to allow what
he could not prevent, and the piano came. It was a small, old-fashioned
instrument, which had been kept in tune by Dr. Douglas, and through long
years the inner life of Miss Lois, her hopes, aspirations, and
disappointments, had found expression through its keys. It was a curious
sight to see the old maid sitting at her piano alone on a stormy
evening, the doors all closed, the shutters locked, no one stirring in
the church-house save herself. Her playing was old-fashioned, her hands
stiff; she could not improvise, and the range of the music she knew was
small and narrow, yet unconsciously it served to her all the purposes of
emotional expression. When she was sad, she played "China"; when she was
hopeful, "Coronation." She made the bass heavy in dejection, and played
the air in octaves when cheerful. She played only when she was entirely
alone. The old piano was the only confidant of the hidden remains of
youthful feeling buried in her heart.

[Illustration: LOIS HINSDALE.]

Rast played on the piano and the violin in an untrained fashion of his
own, and Anne sang; they often had small concerts in Miss Lois's parlor.
But a greater entertainment lay in Anne's recitations. These were all
from Shakspeare. Not in vain had the chaplain kept her tied to its pages
year after year; she had learned, almost unconsciously, as it were,
large portions of the immortal text by heart, and had formed her own
ideals of the characters, who were to her real persons, although as
different from flesh-and-blood people as are the phantoms of a dream.
They were like spirits who came at her call, and lent her their
personality; she could identify herself with them for the time being so
completely, throw herself into the bodies and minds she had
constructed for them so entirely, that the effect was startling, and all
the more so because her conceptions of the characters were girlish and
utterly different from those that have ruled the dramatic stage for
generations. Her ideas of Juliet, of Ophelia, of Rosalind, and Cleopatra
were her own, and she never varied them; the very earnestness of her
personations made the effect all the more extraordinary. Dr. Gaston had
never heard these recitations of his pupil; William Douglas had never
heard them; either of these men could have cor