to join the country
church, though his sole fitness for this step, in so far as I could
gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of this divine melody.
Shortly afterward, he had gone to town on the Fourth of July, been drunk
for several days, lost his money at a faro table, ridden a saddled Texas
steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured collar-bone. All this
my aunt told me huskily, wanderingly, as though she were talking in the
weak lapses of illness.

"Well, we have come to better things than the old Trovatore at any rate,
Aunt Georgie?" I queried, with a well meant effort at jocularity.

Her lip quivered and she hastily put her handkerchief up to her mouth.
From behind it she murmured, "And you have been hearing this ever since
you left me, Clark?" Her question was the gentlest and saddest of
reproaches.

The second half of the program consisted of four numbers from the _Ring,_
and closed with Siegfried's funeral march. My aunt wept quietly, but
almost continuously, as a shallow vessel overflows in a rain-storm. From
time to time her dim eyes looked up at the lights, burning softly under
their dull glass globes.

The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the
shining current of it; I never knew how far it bore her, or past what
happy islands. From the trembling of her face I could well believe that
before the last number she had been carried out where the myriad graves
are, into the grey, nameless burying grounds of the sea; or into some
world of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope
has lain down with hope and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept.

The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and
laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman
made no effort to rise. The harpist slipped the green felt cover over his
instrument; the flute-players shook the water from their mouthpieces;
the men of the orchestra went out one by one, leaving the stage to the
chairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield.

I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. "I don't
want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!"

I understood. For her, just outside the concert hall, lay the black pond
with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with
weather-curled boards, naked as a tower; the crook-backed ash seedlings
where the dish-cloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys pickin