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bursting shells. Suddenly the major stopped to make a more extended scrutiny of the approaches to one of the exploded tunnels. Then he went over the parapet. I started to do likewise; but he turned and said, "I explicitly forbid you to follow me!" He ran as far as the salient formed by the land-slide at the other end of the 150 metres of open trench, and there lay flat on the edge, his head just above the crest of the depression. Evidently he proposed to inspect for himself the construction of the works we had taken. It had all been so sudden, so splendid, that my comrades about me were all a-tremble with excitement.

'I was looking in vain in my knapsack for my lost field-glasses, in order to get a better view, when the young artilleryman exclaimed,

""Why, look! I should say that your major is n't moving!"

"The idea that anything could have happened to him seemed to me so absurd that I replied,

""He's just watching; he is n't going to amuse himself by getting shot." ""See, now he is moving," he added. He saw plainly what I had difficulty in comprehending. "But he's moving in a queer way; let's go over there."

'We rushed out to the tunnel. The artilleryman, getting there first, turned the major over on his side.

'His lips were covered with blood. He recognized me.

""You must notify the general instantly."

"Those were his first words. Then he took some coffee that I offered him and tried to drink it. An infantryman had joined us, having seen from a distance what had happened. Together we carried him, as best we could, setting him down to recover our breath, hampered by the wire entanglements, being in great haste to get him under shelter, to take him down into the trench. VOL. 121-NO.1

""Take care," he said to us as we put him down on the ground; "look out for yourselves."

'We answered I don't know what: much it mattered about us! At last he was in safety. I hurried back to headquarters, as he had ordered, to fetch the

surgeon.

'Meanwhile my comrades who had remained with him unclasped his tunic and laid bare the little wound in the neck, which was bleeding hardly at all, but of which he was to die. He spoke from time to time, inquired about the progress of the attack, and seemed again to come to life when they told him that everything was going well, that the Boches did not counter-attack, that they must have retreated a long way to their lines, that there was, all in all, great

"The surgeon arrived. There was nothing to be done there; he must be removed as soon as possible from the trench, about which the marmites were raining down, and taken to the cantonment. The surgeon poured a little mentholized alcohol on a lump of sugar and put it between his teeth; but the muscular contraction which followed was so painful to the wounded man that he tried to reject the sugar. Then he said, becoming more conscious of the suffering which, perhaps, his prostration had somewhat deadened,

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'He died as we reached the poste de secours. We buried him in one of the cemeteries where they make breaches in the wall to extend them into the adjoining fields.

'Speak of him, my dear master. He is of those who are most worthy to be praised by your voice, which will carry so far into the future, and which will consecrate the memory of those unspotted names which we wish coming generations to love as we love them forever and passionately.

'I am writing incoherently; I know it better than any one; but that must be borne in addition to all the rest.

'I have talked about the major and not enough about the battalion. How provoked he would have been with me for that! Ah! if you knew what an admirable battalion it was, what officers

- and all that we owe them! But

these accounts are of those which are not meant for earthly settlement; which can never be settled for a goodly number of those ardent and devoted young hearts. How many things I could tell you which do not seem incredible to us, because we know our leaders and our comrades, but which are, in reality, incredible, miraculous yet utterly simple.'

Could anything be nobler and more vigorous than this outpouring of a soldier- of a battalion, rather to the glory of its commander! In these admirable pages we perceive that it is from the leader that the whole corps derives its powers, in the strenuous and painful hours, and that it retains a sentiment of infinite gratitude to him who sustains and leads it. When he wrote to me this narrative, which shall not die, Paul Drouot knew not that I should read it at his grave, and that he himself, loyal soldier that he was, would go to his rest in the winding-sheet which he had prepared for his commander.

However great his talent, the poet could never have invented, never have conceived a situation so exalted and so moving as that in which he was an actor during those hours of enthusiasm, of valor, of friendship, and of sacrifice! Ah! how holy is the door through which our young friends are escaping!

THE SENSUAL EAR

BY KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD

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I 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 idea - it 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 un

conspiring, 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 dif ferent 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 Life-Line' 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 Life-Line,' 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 share with all Dissenters, their hymns a few time-honored chants which they 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 educat

ed than I; has listened oftener at twilight to the enchanted choirs of New College and Magdalen. He likes the non-committal melodies of the Hymnal far, far better than the sentimental parti pris of Gospel Hymns.

I know as well as he does that the sentimental quality is of a sort that ought not to be there at all. I know that the music of "Throw Out the Life-Line' belongs morally with the music of 'Old Black Joe,' and 'Oh, Promise Me,' and 'There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night.' I know that the appeal of that tune is sensuous and emotional and personal, and, for a hymn, all, all wrong. I realize that, for church, Gregorian is the only wear; and that the less you diverge therefrom, the more decent you are. I, too, prefer Bach and Palestrina, and, for congregational singing, the oldest Latin hymns you can get. I can even see that the aridity and sameness of the Anglican 'hymn-tunes' are more dignified, and more to the purpose, than the plangent and catchy refrains by which Sankey lured 'wandering boys' back to be safe-folded with 'the ninety and nine.' And yet, when my husband (by request) croons 'Throw Out the LifeLine,' I cannot resist. I am evangelized.

True, I perceived this perniciousness early. Perhaps the white light dawned on me when, in Y.P.S.C.E. days, an older friend (who was in love) confided

to me that the words of a certain Gospel Hymn seemed to her not altogether reverent: they could so easily be applied to a human love-affair. She was quite right, I think. Some of us have felt the same about Crashaw and Giles Fletcher. But though the words were, in all conscience, carnal enough, I believe it was the tune that did the trick and set her dreaming of her young hero.

For I am his, and he is mine,
Forever and forever.

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Oh, the yearning of that refrain: slow and honeyed and melancholy as 'My Old Kentucky Home' or 'Way Down Upon the Suwanee River'! Musically, doubtless, not so good; but musically of the same school, and suggestive it, too of plantations and moonlight and banjos and rich, heartrending negro voices. My friend was right: they are not in the best tradition of reverence, those Moody and Sankey hymns. And yet, here's the rub, why do we remember them, when all but the most universal of the hymns we sang in church and sang much oftener than these, have gone beyond recapturing? My husband resents remembering them; he would far rather remember more worthy things. But I do not: I would not, for anything, lose them out of the rag-bag which is my mind. I am not sure I would not rather lose certain stanzas from the Greek Anthology, which come to my lips in much the same unvolitional fashion. From those refrains I reconstruct a whole moral and social world, even as Cuvier reconstructed his mastodon. You remember what the 'Evening Hymn' did for Mottram and Lowndes in 'The End of the Passage'? Just that 'I Know that My Redeemer Lives' does for me. And this is the point'Rock of Ages' and 'Holy, Holy, Holy' do not do it; though I knew these even earlier, and am still, on occasion, sing

ing them. So it is not all a question of association and the power of youthful memories. It is the very quality of the music the words were negligible, when they were not atrocious that touched in me, and can still touch, something popular, emotional, vulgar; something very low-brow and democratic, not to say mobbish. "The sensual ear.'

Even in youth, I had the sense to differentiate. 'Jerusalem the Golden,' discovered in another hymn-book than our own, was for many years my favorite hymn even during those years when I was singing 'Beulah Land' and 'Wonderful Words of Life.' I knew it was better; I knew I liked it better; I knew that it had more to do with religion than all the 'Beulah Lands' ever written. True, the words helped; and the words of the Gospel Hymns were a hindrance, even then. But my soul recognized the validity, the reality of the music. 'Jerusalem the Golden' remained my favorite until "The Son of God Goes Forth to War' succeeded it in my affections; always to be, until I die, my very favorite. And even while we sang

And view the shining glory shore,

My heaven, my home, for evermore.

I had memories of something still better than 'Jerusalem the Golden': memories of an interval in a French convent where we chanted the Magnificat to its proper plain-song. Though, even there - but I shall come to that later.

II

Not long ago, we had a friend staying with us who was bred a Romanist. How Moody and Sankey got mentioned, I do not know but they did; and our friend insisted that Moody and Sankey could not conceivably be so bad as the modern Catholic hymns. We

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