to take her life.  His terrible deed has plunged a large circle of relatives and friends into great shame and sorrow.

“I had started to my feet as soon as I heard the words, ’The girl is a singer in Peter Bingham’s Variety Theater,’ but, when her name was mentioned and her probable death, the pangs that shot through me no words of mine can describe.

“It is customary with us all to think that our intellect is our self, and that we are only what we think; but there are in the depths of our nature feelings, emotions, qualities of the soul, with which the mere intelligence has nothing to do; and which, when they rise up, like an enraged elephant from the jungle, scatter all the conventionalities of our training, and all the smooth and automaton-like operations of our minds to the winds.  As I stood there, listening to the dead-level, unimpassioned, mechanical voice of the phonograph, pouring forth those deadly sentences, I realized for the first time what the sunny-haired little songstress was to me.

“‘Wounded!  Dead!’

“I seized my hat, and, to the astonishment of the waiters, I rushed out.  I called a hack.  I had to alter my appearance.  I grudged the time necessary for this very necessary precaution, but, paying the driver double fare, I went, as fast as his horses’ legs could carry me, to the place, in a saloon kept by one of the Brotherhood, where I was in the habit of changing my disguises.  I dismissed the hack, hurried to my room, and in a few minutes I was again flying along, in another hack, to 1252 Seward Street.  I rushed up the steps.  Her mother met me in the hall.  She was crying.

“‘Is she alive?’ I asked.

“‘Yes, yes,’ she replied.

“‘What does the doctor say?’ I inquired.

“‘He says she will not die—­but her voice is gone forever,’ she replied.

“Her tears burst forth afresh.  I was shocked—­inexpressibly shocked.  True, it was joy to know she would live; but to think of that noble instrument of grace and joy and melody silenced forever!  It was like the funeral of an angel!  God, in the infinite diversity of his creation, makes so few such voices—­so few such marvelous adjustments of those vibrating chords to the capabilities of the air and the human sense and the infinite human soul that dwells behind the sense—­and all to be the spoil of a ruffian’s knife.  Oh! if I could have laid my hands on the little villain!  I should have butchered him with his own dagger—­sanctified, as it was, with her precious blood.  The infamous little scoundrel!  To think that such a vicious, shallow, drunken brute could have power to ’break into the bloody house of life’ and bring to naught such a precious and unparalleled gift of God.  I had to clutch the railing of the stairs to keep from falling.  Fortunately for me, poor Mrs. Jansen was too much absorbed in her own sorrows to notice mine.  She grieved deeply and sincerely for her daughter’s sufferings and the loss of her voice;