oon as ever she has finished her luncheon, there she is,
out on the front porch hallooing: "Oo-hoo!" How about that? And if he so
much as looks at another girl--m-M!

The first bass is one of these fellows with a flutter in his voice.
No, I don't mean a vibrato. It's a flutter, like a goat's tail. It is
considered real operatic.

The second bass has a great, big Adam's apple that slides up and down
his throat like a toy-monkey on a stick. He is tall, and has eyebrows
like clothes-brushes, and he scowls fit to make you run and hide under
the bed. He is really a good-hearted fellow, though. Pity he has the
dyspepsia so bad. Oh, my, yes! Suffers everything with it, poor man.
He generally sings that song about "Drink-ing! DRINK-ang! Drink-awng!"
though he's strictly temperate himself. When he takes that last low
note, you hold on to your chair for fear you'll fall in too.

But why bring in the male quartet?

Because "The Little Old Red School-house" is more than a mere
collocation of words, accurately descriptive. It is what Mat King would
call a "symblem," and as such requires the music's dying fall to lull
and enervate a too meticulous and stringent tendency to recollect that
it wasn't little, or old, or red, or on a hill. It might have been
big and new, and built of yellow brick, right next to the Second
Presbyterian, and hence close to the "branch," so that the spring
freshets flooded the playground, and the water lapped the base of the
big rock on which we played "King on the Castle,"--the big rock so
pitifully dwindled of late years. No matter what he facts are. Sing 'of
"The Little Old Red Schoolhouse On the Hill" and in everybody's heart
a chord trembles in unison. As we hear its witching strains, we are all
lodge brethren, from Maine to California and far across the Western Sea;
we are all lodge brethren, and the air is "Auld Lang Syne," and we are
clasping hands across, knitted together into one living solidarity;
and this, if we but sensed it, is the real Union, of which the federal
compact is but the outward seeming. It is a Union in which they have
neither art nor part whose parents sent them to private schools, so as
not to have them associate with "that class of people." It is the
true democracy which batters down the walls that separate us from each
other--the walls of caste distinction, and color prejudice, and national
hatred, and religious contempt, all the petty, anti-social meannesses
that quarrel w