Alcott's exceeding fidelity. Begin recalling her for yourself, and you will agree that she gives us social life as New Englanders, for decades, have, on the whole, known it. The relations of parent and child, brother and sister, community and individual, of playmates, of lovers, of citizens, are all such as we know them. They are familiar to us, if not positively in our own experience. Life has grown more complicated everywhere. Yet I doubt if, even now, any New English child would instinctively call Miss Alcott's people underbred. We still understand their code, if we do not practise it. New England is still something more than a convenient term for map-makers. These be our own villages.

I

THE SENSUAL EAR

HAVE a friend who always calls-when he remembers to, for alas! he sometimes

forgets the Methodist Church building in our village, a "conventicle." I wish he did not sometimes forget, for nothing makes me so at peace with my hereditary nonconformity as to hear an Anglican imply, by such verbal affectations, what he thinks of the dissidence of dissent. Methodism is as foreign to me as Anglicanism; yet, I doubt not, the Epworth League sings, in its handsome "conventicle,' just the hymns that of old were sung by the Y. P. S. C. E. It is many a year since I attended a Y. P. S. C. E. meeting; and I have an ideait is almost a fear-that Gospel Hymns, No. 5, is by this time Gospel Hymns, No. 10, and that some of the most haunting melodies are gone therefrom. Perhaps the "Endeavorers" are now chanting Hymns Ancient and Modern. But I hope not. Oh, I cannot think it!

When life grows very dreary; when the Hindenburg line seems to turn from shadow to substance; when the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies has indulged in a new "democratic" vagary; when flour has gone up two dollars more a barrel and the priceless potato is but a soggy pearl, deserving to be cast before swine; when another member of

the family has broken a leg or had appendicitis-then my husband (he, too, of yore an "Endeavorer") and I are wont to burst, simultaneously, mechanically, unthinking and unconspiring, into song. And the songs we hear each other humming in separate recesses of the house are Gospel Hymns. Humming, we converge upon the drawing-room from our different retreats; and sometimes we look each other in the eye and say hardily, "Let's." Then we sit down and incite each other to a desperate vocalism. We see how many we can remember, out of our evangelistic youth, and we sing them all. We remember a good many, if truth be told; and once I found a rapt huddle of colored servants on the stair-landing getting a free "revival." Neither of us has a voice worth mentioning, so I think that we must, without realizing it, have reproduced the fervor along with the words.

They were cannily arranged, those Moody and Sankey hymns: if you sing them at all, you cannot help pounding down on the essential words. They wallow in beat and accent. "A Shelter in the Time of Storm." We usually begin with that. It is ineluctable. But oh, how I wish that either of us could remember more than one "verse" of

Well, wife, I've found the model church,

And worshipped there to-day;

It made me think of good old times
Before my hair was gray.

I have never heard it sung-I never "belonged" to the Y. P. S. C. E.-but my husband says that he has. My husband also says that he has heard "the trundle-bed one." I do not believe it, though he is a truthful man. I cannot believe it; the less, that he remembers none of the words, and that it is only I, who recall, visually, in the lower corner of a page,

Poking (perhaps it was another verb) 'mid the dust and rafters

There I found my trundle-bed.

A slight altercation always develops here. Why should he be more royalist than the king? It is not conceivable that it was ever sung; and even he cannot remember the tune; so we join forces in "To the Work, to the Work," or "There Shall Be Showers of Blessing."

(Mercy-drops round us are fall-ing,
But for the showers we plead.)

He has an uncanny and inexplicable prejudice against "God Be with You Till We Meet Again"-perhaps because they always sang it for the last one. But I can usually get him to "oblige" with a solo-"Throw Out the LifeLine"-which I am sure was not in "No. 5," because we never, never sang it; though I do remember hearing a returning delegate to a Y. P. S. C. E. convention say that it was the one "the people of Montreal seemed to like best." Somewhere in the nineties, Endeavorers in

thousands sang it all up and down Sherbrooke Street, apparently. Well: I am like the people of Montreal. It always "gets" me, in the dissenting marrow of my dissenting soul; and when my husband has "obliged" me with it, I am ready to forget the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies. What can the devil do in the face of "Throw Out the Life-Line," and its "linked sweetness long drawn out"?

By all of which it is made evident that, in the matter of hymns, mine is the "sensual ear." (Not so my husband's: he sings them in the critical spirit, as he might illustrate a violation of rhetoric. He loathes "Throw Out the LifeLine," even while the chorus makes his voice appeal and yearn in spite of him. As I said, he does it only to oblige.) The church of my choosing, if not of my profession, is the same as that of my friend who talks of "conventicles." There I sing Hymns Ancient and Modern (or that American corruption thereof, the Hymnal) with the most conforming. And certainly, except for a few time-honored chants which they share with all Dissenters, their hymns are to me "ditties of no tone." My husband disagrees with me; but he is not, equally with me, the predestined prey of the brass band. He is better educated than I; has listened oftener at twilight to the enchanted choirs of New College and Magdalen. He likes the non-committal melodies of the