coyly did she
give this, with inciting, blushing implications, but rather with an
unbending, disapproving sternness, as if with intent to divert the minds
of her listeners from the song's frank ribaldry to its purely musical
values.

Eustace followed with a solo:--

"Nigh to a grave that was newly made,
Leaned a sexton old on his earth-worn spade."

In the very low parts, where the sexton old is required to say, "I
gather them in," he was most effective, and many of his more susceptible
hearers shuddered. For an encore he sang, "I am the old Turnkey," which
goes lower and lower with deliberate steps until it descends to
incredible depths of bassness.

It was a rare comfort to the Eubanks ladies that Eustace was a bass
instead of a tenor. They had observed that most tenor songs are of a
suggestive and meretricious character. Arthur Updyke, for example, who
clerked in the city drug store, was a tenor, and nearly all of his songs
were distressingly sentimental; indeed, fairly indelicate at times in
their lack of reserve about kisses and embraces and sighs and ecstasies.
Glad indeed were the guardians of Eustace that his voice had lowered to
a salutary depth, and that bass songs in general were pure and
innocent,--songs of death, of dungeons, of honest war, or of diving
beneath the deep blue sea--down, down, down, as far as the singer's
chest tones permitted. With "Euty" a tenor, warbling those pernicious
boudoir _chansons_ of moonlight and longing of sighing love and
anguished passion, they suspected that he would have been harder to
manage. Even as it was, he had once brought home a most dreadful thing
called "A Bedouin Love Song," for a bass voice, truly enough, but so
fearfully outspoken about matters far better left unmentioned among nice
people that the three girls had fled horrified from the room after that
first verse:--

"From the desert I come to thee,
On a stallion shod with fire,
And the wind is left behind
In the speed of my desire."

The mother sped to her daughters' appeal for help and required her son
to sing "The Lost Chord" as a febrifuge. The other song was confiscated
after the mother had read the words so unblushingly penned by an author
whom she ever afterward deemed an abandoned profligate. She considered
that Bedouins must be unspeakable creatures--but how much lower the mind
that could portray their depravity, and send it out into the world for
innocent young men to c