This over, the elder Miss Eubanks—­Marcella of the severe mien—­sang interestingly, “I gathered Shells upon the Shore,” and for an encore, in response to eager demands, “Comin’ thro’ the Rye.”  Not coyly did she give this, with inciting, blushing implications, but rather with an unbending, disapproving sternness, as if with intent to divert the minds of her listeners from the song’s frank ribaldry to its purely musical values.

Eustace followed with a solo:—­

   “Nigh to a grave that was newly made,
    Leaned a sexton old on his earth-worn spade.”

In the very low parts, where the sexton old is required to say, “I gather them in,” he was most effective, and many of his more susceptible hearers shuddered.  For an encore he sang, “I am the old Turnkey,” which goes lower and lower with deliberate steps until it descends to incredible depths of bassness.

It was a rare comfort to the Eubanks ladies that Eustace was a bass instead of a tenor.  They had observed that most tenor songs are of a suggestive and meretricious character.  Arthur Updyke, for example, who clerked in the city drug store, was a tenor, and nearly all of his songs were distressingly sentimental; indeed, fairly indelicate at times in their lack of reserve about kisses and embraces and sighs and ecstasies.  Glad indeed were the guardians of Eustace that his voice had lowered to a salutary depth, and that bass songs in general were pure and innocent,—­songs of death, of dungeons, of honest war, or of diving beneath the deep blue sea—­down, down, down, as far as the singer’s chest tones permitted.  With “Euty” a tenor, warbling those pernicious boudoir chansons of moonlight and longing of sighing love and anguished passion, they suspected that he would have been harder to manage.  Even as it was, he had once brought home a most dreadful thing called “A Bedouin Love Song,” for a bass voice, truly enough, but so fearfully outspoken about matters far better left unmentioned among nice people that the three girls had fled horrified from the room after that first verse:—­

   “From the desert I come to thee,
    On a stallion shod with fire,
    And the wind is left behind
    In the speed of my desire.”

The mother sped to her daughters’ appeal for help and required her son to sing “The Lost Chord” as a febrifuge.  The other song was confiscated after the mother had read the words so unblushingly penned by an author whom she ever afterward deemed an abandoned profligate.  She considered that Bedouins must be unspeakable creatures—­but how much lower the mind that could portray their depravity, and send it out into the world for innocent young men to carol in the homes of our best people!

Thereafter Eustace sang only songs that had been censored by his family, and his repertoire was now stainless, containing no song in which a romantic attachment was even hinted at; but only those reciting wholesome adventures, military and marine, pastoral scenes and occupations, or the religious experience of the singer.