Our Boy-Organist.
What He Saw, And What Came Of It.
"How was it, doctor, that you first thought about it?"
Well, I suppose I had better tell you the whole story. It may interest you. Just twenty years ago, on a bright Sunday morning, I was hurrying along the road home to Tinton, hoping to be in time to hear the sermon at church. My watch told me that I should be too late for the morning prayer. Happening to look across the fields, I was surprised to see little Ally Dutton, our boy-organist, running very fast over the meadows, leaping the fences at a bound, and finally disappear in the woods. "What could possibly take our organist away during church time? Surely," thought I, "the minister must be sick. And, being the village doctor, I hurried still faster.
"But what could take our boy-organist in that out-of-the-way direction at such an hour, and in such haste? Is it mischief?" I asked myself. But I banished that thought immediately, for Ally had no such reputation. "There must be something wrong, however; for he ran so fast, and Ally is such a quiet, old-fashioned lad. The minister is ill, at any rate," said I to myself, "or Ally would not be absent." Contrary to my expectations, I found the minister preaching as usual. I do not recollect any thing of the sermon now except the text. Rev. Mr. Billups, our minister, had a fashion of repeating his texts very often, sometimes very appropriately, and sometimes not. It was Pilate's question to our Lord: "What is truth?" You will see, after what happened subsequently, that I had another reason for remembering it besides its frequent repetition. The sermon ended, the hymn was sung, but the organ was silent. The silence seemed ominous. I cannot explain why; perhaps it was one of those strange presentiments of disaster, but I fancied our boy-organist dead. I loved Ally very much, and my heart sank within me as I looked up through the drawn choir-curtains, and missed his slight little form, perched up as he was wont to be, on a pile of books so as to bring his hands on a level with the key-board, trolling forth his gay little voluntary as the congregation dispersed after service. I missed his voice in the hymn, too; those clear, ringing tones which were far sweeter to me than any notes that musical instrument ever breathed. I was so filled with this presentiment of coming evil that I did not dare to ask any one the cause of his absence. "Pooh!" said I to myself, "there is nothing in it. I saw him but just now alive, and well enough, if I may judge from the way he cleared those fences and the swiftness of his footsteps as he ran across the meadows." I thought no more of it until a messenger came two or three days afterward to my office and said:
"Will you please, doctor, come down to the widow Button's? Ally is sick."
"I will come immediately," said I to the messenger. "We shall lose our boy-organist," said I to myself. And so we did; but not as you suppose. Ally became—but I must not anticipate.
I found our much loved boy-organist in a high fever. "He has been constantly raving all night," said his mother, in answer to my inquiries, "about what he has seen. There has been something preying on his mind lately," she continued. "He has been very sad and nervous, and I fear it has helped to make him ill."