I wish I had time to tell you the rest of the story about our church choir. Once more it was reconstructed. He declared that all our singers were either ill-humored or hysterical, and every one of them flatted.
Then our Boston guest took up the burden. For three weeks she preached the Gospel to us in song, alone, utterly unsustained, save by the organist, who bravely held the fort with her. During those three weeks she worked. She gathered the girls about her—those elements of power in every church, if they were only understood. "Let us have a new choir," she said; "let us take this for our motto:
"'Take my voice, and let me sing
Ever, only for my King.'"
She printed those words in illuminated text, and framed them and hung them in the choir gallery.
In process of time they found a leader, one who was willing to sing by the new motto. I will not tell the story; it is long. But, in its details, it shows what we each need to more fully realize; the power of reconstruction which lies in one young consecrated life. Three months our borrowed songstress stayed with us, and when she went away she left our choir singing by the motto; the essential difference between their music and all others which we had ever enjoyed being embodied in that one brief sentence: They meant the words.
The last time I heard Alice Haviland sing was in our church, on a week-day afternoon, just as the autumn leaves were beginning to fall. She stood near to an open coffin, in which lay an old, worn body, a wrinkled face, crowned with white satin hair, and the most reposeful smile that ever Auntie Barber's dear old face had ever worn. And the young singer, looking down on the quiet sleeper, breathed out the words to wondrous melody:
"Forever with the Lord,
Amen, so let it be;
Life from the dead is in that word,
'Tis immortality.
"Servant of Christ, well done;
Praise be thy new employ;
And while eternal ages run.
Rest in thy Saviour's joy."
And as the voice ceased, and the singer turned toward me with tear-dimmed eyes, while they closed the coffin-lid, she murmured: "I am sure Auntie Barber has already joined the choir. Her soul was just full of song. And, oh! How she can sing now. And she will always mean the words."