htly
touching the table at which Londonderry sat as chairman, and the other
at her side; and before she began her first recitation she glanced
quietly over the audience, as though her eyes were thus preparing the
proper magnetic atmosphere for her voice.

She began with some simple Longfellow poem, that New Zion might feel at
home; then she recited a fairy poem called "The Forsaken Merman," which,
of course, was only a fairy tale, and yet somehow was so full of human
pathos that it was more real than if it had been really "real," that
is, prosaic.

For impressing the imagination of her audience she relied mainly on her
own imagination and her voice; striking no attitudes, and allowing
herself nothing of that facial distortion which is the resort of the
unimaginative, and destroys not creates illusion. Of course, her face
changed, but the change was one of which she was probably unconscious,
and which she couldn't have reproduced to her mirror; it was not a play
of features, but a play of lights and shadows and nerves, a flow or an
ebb of radiance in the eyes, a subtle sensitiveness of the lips and
nerves; and her effect was mainly produced by her voice, over which she
wielded indescribable powers of modulation. It was a voice so
sympathetic, so intimate, that it almost seemed too intimate, too
appealingly sympathetic. It was so a woman might recite to a man she
loved, but you almost felt as though the voice were too personal a
revelation for an audience,--felt an impulse, so to say, to throw a veil
over it, though you were glad from your soul that no one threw it. And
the voice was a wonderful actor too. It could act the scenery as well.
You saw it all, you heard it all, you felt it all, in the voice:--the
great winds blowing shorewards, the wild white horses in the spray,

"The white-walled town,
And the little gray church on the windy shore;"

and when she said, "Down, down, down!" you were indeed in the very
depths of the sea--and were all sitting, Mr. Moggridge with the rest,
amid coral caves and seaweed, and in a curious green and
shimmering light.

But what a world of heart-break there was in her "Come, dear children,
come away!" You felt you simply couldn't bear her to say it again. Next
time you'd have to cry, and cry you did, and you weren't ashamed, for
suddenly when you came out of the trance of the voice you found that
every one else was crying too, and Mr. Londonderry had