“Oh, are you going to the museum?” said Flossy.  “Then please get me one of the ‘Bliss’ singing books, will you?  I want to secure one before they are all gone.  Girls, don’t you each want one of them to take home?  The hymns are lovely.”

“I don’t,” said Eurie, “unless he is for sale to go along and sing them.  I can’t imagine anything tamer than to hear some commonplace voice trying to do those songs that he roars out without any effort at all.  What has become of the man?”

“He has gone,” said Marion.  “Called home suddenly, some one told me.  His singing is splendid, isn’t it?  I don’t know but I feel much as you do about the book.  Think of having Deacon Miller try to sing, ’Only an armor-bearer!’ I don’t mind telling you that I felt very much as if I were being lifted right off my feet and carried up somewhere, I hardly know where, when I heard him sing that.  I was coming down the hill, away off, you know, by the post-office—­no, away above the post-office, and he suddenly burst forth.  I stopped to listen, and I could hear every single word as distinctly as I can hear you in this tent.”

“Hear!” said Eurie, “I guess you could.  I shouldn’t be surprised if they heard him over at Mayville, and that is what brings such crowds here every day.  Did you ever see anything like the way the people come here, anyhow?”

“I don’t feel at all as you do,” said Flossy, going back to the question of singing-books.  “After we get let down a little, ’Only an armor-bearer’ will sound very well even from common singers.  It has in it what can’t be taken out because a certain voice is lost; and the book is full of other and simpler pieces, and lovely choruses, that people can catch after one hearing.”

“Flossy is going home to introduce it into the First Church,” Eurie said, gravely.

Flossy’s cheeks flushed.

“I had not thought of that,” she said, simply; “perhaps we can.  In any case get me a couple, Eurie.”

The discussion on the morning service ended in a division of the party.  Ruth, who had come over early on purpose to attend, was obliged to succumb to a feeling of utter weariness and lie down.

Eurie steadily refused to go to the platform meeting, assuring them that she knew Dr. Deems would be “as dry as a stick; all New York ministers were.”

So Flossy and Marion went away together, Marion with her note-book in the hope of getting an item for a newspaper letter that must be written that afternoon.

They were late, and almost abandoned in despair the hope of getting within hearing, until a happy thought suggested a seat on the platform stair at the speaker’s back.  There was a “crack” there, Marion said, into which they presently crept.

The address was already commenced.  Marion listened at first with that indifferent air that a face wears when its owner perforce commences in the middle of a thing, and has to wait his way to a tangible idea of what is being said.