Till out of the beautiful garden beyond
A pistol-shot rings on the air.
"Now see, in the moonlight a handsome youth lays—
Too quickly his life doth depart;
While kneeling beside him, the woman he'd loved
Finds her picture is close to his heart."
"What is the name of that song?" I asked when the last cadence of Phœbe's voice, which was sustained long after every other in the room was hushed, had died away.
"That! Why, it's 'The Banquet in Misery Hall,'" answered Mrs. Smith, somewhat impatient of my unfolding ignorance. But I speedily forgot the rebuke in a lively interest in the songs that followed one another without interlude. Phœbe was counting her pile of boxes and ranging them into piles of twelve high; so she couldn't sing, and I, consequently, could not catch all the words of each song. The theme in every case was a more or less ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal rendition of the claptrap morality exploited in the cheap story-books. Reduced to the last analysis, they had to do with but one subject—the frailty of woman. On the one side was presented Virtue tempted, betrayed, repentant; on the other side, Virtue fighting at bay, persecuted, scourged, but emerging in the end unspotted and victorious, with all good things added unto it.
It was to me an entirely new way of looking at life; and though I couldn't in the least explain it to myself, it seemed, to my unsophisticated way of looking at such matters, that the propensity to break the seventh commandment was much exaggerated, and that songs about other subjects would have been much more interesting and not nearly so trying to the feelings. For the sweet voices of the singers could not but make the tears come to my eyes, in spite of the fact that the burden of the song seemed so unworthy.
"You all sing so beautifully!" I cried, in honest admiration, at the close of one particularly melodious and extremely silly ditty. "Where did you learn?"