I was only going to say that I should have drowned myself.  For Lake Erie was close by, and it is so much better to accept asphyxia, which takes only three minutes by the watch, than a mesalliance, that lasts fifty years to begin with, and then passes along down the line of descent, (breaking out in all manner of boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men were only as short-lived as horses, could be readily traced back through the square-roots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you have hung the armorial bearings of the De Champignons or the De la Morues, until one came to beings that ate with knives and said “Haow?”) that no person of right feeling could have hesitated for a single moment.

The second of the ravishing voices I have heard was, as I have said, that of another German woman.—­I suppose I shall ruin myself by saying that such a voice could not have come from any Americanized human being.

—­What was there in it?—­said the schoolmistress,—­and, upon my word, her tones were so very musical, that I almost wished I had said three voices instead of two, and not made the unpatriotic remark above reported.—­Oh, I said, it had so much woman in it, —­muliebrity, as well as femineity;—­no self-assertion, such as free suffrage introduces into every word and movement; large, vigorous nature, running back to those huge-limbed Germans of Tacitus, but subdued by the reverential training and tuned by the kindly culture of fifty generations.  Sharp business habits, a lean soil, independence, enterprise, and east winds, are not the best things for the larynx.  Still, you hear noble voices among us,—­I have known families famous for them,—­but ask the first person you meet a question, and ten to one there is a hard, sharp, metallic, matter-of-business clink in the accents of the answer, that produces the effect of one of those bells which small trades-people connect with their shop-doors, and which spring upon your ear with such vivacity, as you enter, that your first impulse is to retire at once from the precincts.

—­Ah, but I must not forget that dear little child I saw and heard in a French hospital.  Between two and three years old.  Fell out of her chair and snapped both thigh-bones.  Lying in bed, patient, gentle.  Rough students round her, some in white aprons, looking fearfully business-like; but the child placid, perfectly still.  I spoke to her, and the blessed little creature answered me in a voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in it which you have heard in the thrush’s even-song, that I hear it at this moment, while I am writing, so many, many years afterwards.  —­C’est tout comme un serin, said the French student at my side.