—­What in the world can have become of That Boy and his popgun while all this somewhat extended sermonizing was going on?  I don’t wonder you ask, beloved Reader, and I suppose I must tell you how we got on so long without interruption.  Well, the plain truth is, the youngster was contemplating his gastric centre, like the monks of Mount Athos, but in a less happy state of mind than those tranquil recluses, in consequence of indulgence in the heterogeneous assortment of luxuries procured with the five-cent piece given him by the kind-hearted old Master.  But you need not think I am going to tell you every time his popgun goes off, making a Selah of him whenever I want to change the subject.  Occasionally he was ill-timed in his artillery practice and ignominiously rebuked, sometimes he was harmlessly playful and nobody minded him, but every now and then he came in so apropos that I am morally certain he gets a hint from somebody who watches the course of the conversation, and means through him to have a hand in it and stop any of us when we are getting prosy.  But in consequence of That Boy’s indiscretion, we were without a check upon our expansiveness, and ran on in the way you have observed and may be disposed to find fault with.

One other thing the Master said before we left the table, after our long talk of that day.

—­I have been tempted sometimes,—­said he, to envy the immediate triumphs of the singer.  He enjoys all that praise can do for him and at the very moment of exerting his talent.  And the singing women!  Once in a while, in the course of my life, I have found myself in the midst of a tulip-bed of full-dressed, handsome women in all their glory, and when some one among them has shaken her gauzy wings, and sat down before the piano, and then, only giving the keys a soft touch now and then to support her voice, has warbled some sweet, sad melody intertwined with the longings or regrets of some tender-hearted poet, it has seemed to me that so to hush the rustling of the silks and silence the babble of the buds, as they call the chicks of a new season, and light up the flame of romance in cold hearts, in desolate ones, in old burnt-out ones,—­like mine, I was going to say, but I won’t, for it isn’t so, and you may laugh to hear me say it isn’t so, if you like,—­was perhaps better than to be remembered a few hundred years by a few perfect stanzas, when your gravestone is standing aslant, and your name is covered over with a lichen as big as a militia colonel’s cockade, and nobody knows or cares enough about you to scrape it off and set the tipsy old slate-stone upright again.