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It did not please Jack to play with his comrades just then. Pie felt sulky and aggrieved. He would have liked to play with the terrier who had stood by him in his troubles, and barked at the gardener; but that little friend now trotted after his mistress, who had gone to choir-practice.

Jack wandered about among the shrubberies. By-and-by he heard sounds of music, and led by these he came to a gate in a wall, dividing the Vicarage garden from the churchyard. Jack loved music, and the organ and the voices drew him on till he reached the church porch; but there he was startled by a voice that was not only not the voice of song, but was the utterance of a moan so doleful that it seemed the outpouring of all his lonely, and outcast, and injured feelings in one comprehensive howl.

It was the voice of the silver-haired terrier. He was sitting in the porch, his nose up, his ears down, his eyes shut, his mouth open, bewailing in bitterness of spirit the second and greater crook of his lot.

To what purpose were all the caresses and care and indulgence of his mistress, the daily walks, the weekly washings and combings, the constant companionship, when she betrayed her abiding sense of his inferiority, first, by not letting him sleep on the white quilt, and secondly, by never allowing him to go to church?

Jack shared the terrier’s mood. What were tea and plum-cake to him, when his pauper-breeding was so stamped upon him that the gardener was free to say–“A nice tale too! What’s thou to do wi’ doves, and thou a work’us lad?”–and to take for granted that he would thieve and lie if he got the chance?

His disabilities were not the dog’s, however. The parish church was his as well as another’s, and he crept inside and leaned against one of the stone pillars, as if it were a big, calm friend.

Far away, under the transept, a group of boys and men held their music near to their faces in the waning light. Among them towered the burly choirmaster, baton in hand. The parson’s daughter was at the organ. Well accustomed to produce his voice to good purpose, the choirmaster’s words were clearly to be heard throughout the building, and it was on the subject of articulation and emphasis, and the like, that he was speaking; now and then throwing in an extra aspirate in the energy of that enthusiasm without which teaching is not worth the name.

“That’ll not do. We must have it altogether different. You two lads are singing like bumblebees in a pitcher–border there, boys!–it’s no laughing matter–put down those papers and keep your eyes on me–inflate the chest–” (his own seemed to fill the field of vision) “and try and give forth those noble words as if you’d an idea what they meant.”

No satire was intended or taken here, but the two boys, who were practicing their duet in an anthem, laid down the music, and turned their eyes on their teacher.

“I’ll run through the recitative,” he added, “and take your time from the stick. And mind that OH.”

The parson’s daughter struck a chord, and then the burly choirmaster spoke with the voice of melody:

“My heart is disquieted within me. My heart–my heart is disquieted within me. And the fear of death is fallen–is fallen upon me.”

The terrier moaned without, and Jack thought no boy’s voice could be worth listening to after that of the choirmaster. But he was wrong. A few more notes from the organ, and then, as night-stillness in a wood is broken by the nightingale, so upon the silence of the church a boy-alto’s voice broke forth in obedience to the choirmaster’s uplifted hand:

“Then, I said–I said—-“

Jack gasped, but even as he strained his eyes to see what such a singer could look like, with higher, clearer notes the soprano rose above him –“Then I sa–a–id,” and the duet began: