that he might
not overlook it, got drunk every day.

But, even those seraphic Sundays were surpassed by the Wednesday concerts
established for the patriarchal family. At those concerts she would sit
down to the piano and sing them, in her own tongue, songs of her own
land, songs calling from the mountain-tops to Vendale, "Rise above the
grovelling level country; come far away from the crowd; pursue me as I
mount higher; higher, higher, melting into the azure distance; rise to my
supremest height of all, and love me here!" Then would the pretty
bodice, the clocked stocking, and the silver-buckled shoe be, like the
broad forehead and the bright eyes, fraught with the spring of a very
chamois, until the strain was over.

Not even over Vendale himself did these songs of hers cast a more potent
spell than over Joey Ladle in his different way. Steadily refusing to
muddle the harmony by taking any share in it, and evincing the supremest
contempt for scales and such-like rudiments of music--which, indeed,
seldom captivate mere listeners--Joey did at first give up the whole
business for a bad job, and the whole of the performers for a set of
howling Dervishes. But, descrying traces of unmuddled harmony in a part-
song one day, he gave his two under cellarmen faint hopes of getting on
towards something in course of time. An anthem of Handel's led to
further encouragement from him: though he objected that that great
musician must have been down in some of them foreign cellars pretty much,
for to go and say the same thing so many times over; which, took it in
how you might, he considered a certain sign of your having took it in
somehow. On a third occasion, the public appearance of Mr. Jarvis with a
flute, and of an odd man with a violin, and the performance of a duet by
the two, did so astonish him that, solely of his own impulse and motion,
he became inspired with the words, "Ann Koar!" repeatedly pronouncing
them as if calling in a familiar manner for some lady who had
distinguished herself in the orchestra. But this was his final testimony
to the merits of his mates, for, the instrumental duet being performed at
the first Wednesday concert, and being presently followed by the voice of
Marguerite Obenreizer, he sat with his mouth wide open, entranced, until
she had finished; when, rising in his place with much solemnity, and
prefacing what he was about to say with a bow that specially included Mr.
Wilding in it, he deli