In spite of his meditations, his single volume, and his habit of retiring early, he found his evenings were growing lonely and tedious.  He missed the prayer meeting, and, above all, the hymns.  He had a fine baritone voice, sympathetic, as may be imagined, but not cultivated.  One night, in the seclusion of his garden, and secure in his distance from other dwellings, he raised his voice in a familiar camp-meeting hymn with a strong Covenanter’s ring in the chorus.  Growing bolder as he went on, he at last filled the quiet night with the strenuous sweep of his chant.  Surprised at his own fervor, he paused for a moment, listening, half frightened, half ashamed of his outbreak.  But there was only the trilling of the night wind in the leaves, or the far-off yelp of a coyote.

For a moment he thought he heard the metallic twang of a stringed instrument in the Mission garden beyond his own, and remembered his contiguity to the church with a stir of defiance.  But he was relieved, nevertheless.  His pent-up emotion had found vent, and without the nervous excitement that had followed his old exaltation.  That night he slept better.  He had found the Lord again—­with Psalmody!

The next evening he chanced upon a softer hymn of the same simplicity, but with a vein of human tenderness in its aspirations, which his more hopeful mood gently rendered.  At the conclusion of the first verse he was, however, distinctly conscious of being followed by the same twanging sound he had heard on the previous night, and which even his untutored ear could recognize as an attempt to accompany him.  But before he had finished the second verse the unknown player, after an ingenious but ineffectual essay to grasp the right chord, abandoned it with an impatient and almost pettish flourish, and a loud bang upon the sounding-board of the unseen instrument.  Masterton finished it alone.

With his curiosity excited, however, he tried to discover the locality of the hidden player.  The sound evidently came from the Mission garden; but in his ignorance of the language he could not even interrogate his Indian housekeeper.  On the third night, however, his hymn was uninterrupted by any sound from the former musician.  A sense of disappointment, he knew not why, came over him.  The kindly overture of the unseen player had been a relief to his loneliness.  Yet he had barely concluded the hymn when the familiar sound again struck his ears.  But this time the musician played boldly, confidently, and with a singular skill on the instrument.

The brilliant prelude over, to his entire surprise and some confusion, a soprano voice, high, childish, but infinitely quaint and fascinating, was mischievously uplifted.  But alas! even to his ears, ignorant of the language, it was very clearly a song of levity and wantonness, of freedom and license, of coquetry and incitement!  Yet such was its fascination that he fancied it was reclaimed by the delightful childlike and innocent expression of the singer.