tance, then in crescendo until he had
passed and another succeeded him, and all the while Cora lay
tossing and whispering between clenched teeth. Having ample
reason, that morning, to prefer sleep to thinking, sleep was
impossible. But she fought for it: she did not easily surrender
what she wanted; and she struggled on, with closed eyes, long
after she had heard the others go down to breakfast.

About a hundred yards from her windows, to the rear, were the open
windows of a church which fronted the next street, and stood
dos-a-dos to the dwelling of the Madisons. The Sunday-school hour
had been advanced for the hot weather, and, partly on this
account, and partly because of the summer absence of many
families, the attendants were few. But the young voices were
conducted, rather than accompanied, in pious melody by a cornetist
who worthily thought to amend, in his single person, what lack of
volume this paucity occasioned. He was a slender young man in hot
black clothes; he wore the unfacaded collar fatally and
unanimously adopted by all adam's-apple men of morals; he was
washed, fair, flat-skulled, clean-minded, and industrious; and the
only noise of any kind he ever made in the world was on Sunday.

"Prashus joowuls, sweet joowuls, _thee_ jams off iz crowowun,"
sang the little voices feebly. They were almost unheard; but the
young man helped them out: figuratively, he put them out. And the
cornet was heard: it was heard for blocks and blocks; it was heard
over all that part of the town--in the vicinity of the church it
was the only thing that could be heard. In his daily walk this
cornetist had no enemies: he was kind-hearted; he would not have
shot a mad dog; he gladly nursed the sick. He sat upon the
platform before the children; he swelled, perspired and blew, and
felt that it was a good blowing. If other thoughts vapoured upon
the borders of his mind, they were of the dinner he would eat,
soon after noon, at the house of one of the frilled, white-muslin
teachers. He was serene. His eyes were not blasted; his heart was
not instantly withered; his thin, bluish hair did not fall from
his head; his limbs were not detached from his torso--yet these
misfortunes had been desired for him, with comprehension and
sincerity, at the first flat blat of his brassy horn.

It is impossible to imagine the state of mind of this young
cornetist, could he have known that he had caused the prettiest
girl in town to jump violently