This little apprehension was mercifully unsuspected by Edgar, otherwise it is to be feared that the services of a physician would have been required in the Mullaly household. Not that Edgar had any professional pride in his voice. He possessed, according to his own ideas, many more valuable and decorative qualities. His power of song was entirely hereditary, and came to him from his father, who was of English descent. The elder Mr. Ogden, whom rumor reported to run frequent risks of being bitten like a serpent and stung like an adder at the last, had mounted to a dizzy height in the Knights of Pythias entirely through his voice, a sweet and powerful tenor, and was accustomed to spend the greater part of his time in committing to memory and practising dramatic songs of a highly moral variety with choruses on this order:
“‘You lie! I saw you steal that ace!’
A crashing blow right in the face—
A pistol shot and death’s disgrace
Was in that pack of cards!”
At the proper point, a friend in another room would shoot off a blank cartridge to a stormy accompaniment on the Pythian piano, and the Knights would become so appreciative that the soloist, to borrow a classical phrase, rarely got home until morning. What time Mr. Ogden found himself able to spare from getting up his repertoire was judiciously employed in borrowing money for the purchase of new articles of regalia, for with the Pythians to rise was to shine.
His elder son Samuel, familiarly known as Squealer, inherited both his father’s tendencies, and was in great demand among the saloons and pool-rooms, where he sang ballads of a tender and moral nature, dealing mostly with the Home, and the sanctity of the family relation in general. One of these in especial, in which Squealer assumed a hortatory attitude and besought an imaginary parent to “take her back, Dad,” adding in a melting baritone,
“She’s my mother and your wife!”
so affected a certain bar-room habitué, whose habit of chasing his family through the tenement with a carving-knife had led them to move out of town, that he had been known to lay his head on the bar and weep audibly.
It was a moot point among his friends as to which was Squealer’s real chef d’œuvre, the song just mentioned or another which ran,