But you need
not think I am going to tell you every time his popgun goes off, making a
Selah of him whenever I want to change the subject. Occasionally he was
ill-timed in his artillery practice and ignominiously rebuked, sometimes
he was harmlessly playful and nobody minded him, but every now and then
he came in so apropos that I am morally certain he gets a hint from
somebody who watches the course of the conversation, and means through
him to have a hand in it and stop any of us when we are getting prosy.
But in consequence of That Boy's indiscretion, we were without a check
upon our expansiveness, and ran on in the way you have observed and may
be disposed to find fault with.
One other thing the Master said before we left the table, after our long
talk of that day.
--I have been tempted sometimes,--said he, to envy the immediate triumphs
of the singer. He enjoys all that praise can do for him and at the very
moment of exerting his talent. And the singing women! Once in a while,
in the course of my life, I have found myself in the midst of a tulip-bed
of full-dressed, handsome women in all their glory, and when some one
among them has shaken her gauzy wings, and sat down before the piano, and
then, only giving the keys a soft touch now and then to support her
voice, has warbled some sweet, sad melody intertwined with the longings
or regrets of some tender-hearted poet, it has seemed to me that so to
hush the rustling of the silks and silence the babble of the buds, as
they call the chicks of a new season, and light up the flame of romance
in cold hearts, in desolate ones, in old burnt-out ones,--like mine, I
was going to say, but I won't, for it isn't so, and you may laugh to hear
me say it isn't so, if you like,--was perhaps better than to be
remembered a few hundred years by a few perfect stanzas, when your
gravestone is standing aslant, and your name is covered over with a
lichen as big as a militia colonel's cockade, and nobody knows or cares
enough about you to scrape it off and set the tipsy old slate-stone
upright again.
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