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Gurney's office; it seemed to him that he had set out upon a happy journey since then, and that he had reached another planet, where Mary Vertrees and he sat alone together listening to a vast choiring of invisible soldiers and holy angels. There were armies of voices about them singing praise and thanksgiving; and yet they were alone.

After that she undertook the rôle of missionary in some sort, and in quiet unobtrusive ways suggested bits of orthodox doctrine of much solace to his ruminating spirit, and sometimes on dreary, icebound days he and she and Fifine sat on the crudely fashioned benches before the fire and sang psalms and hymns together till the station rang with the solemn choiring.

'Tis from yon heath-roofed shieling; now it dies Away, now rises full; it is the song Which He who listens to the hallelujahs Of choiring seraphim delights to hear; It is the music of the heart, the voice Of venerable age, of guileless youth, In kindly circle seated on the ground Before their wicker door."

Jones says, for instance: "In short, I am compelled to think that this Light of Souls, this saving and redeeming spirit, was the loved and loving child of Joseph, the carpenter, and the loyal wife Mary. I believe this, notwithstanding the stories of immaculate conceptions, star-guided magi, choiring angels and adoring shepards that gathered around the birth-night."

To sit in the stalls and watch the incredible jumble-show, the reason-defying topsy-turvydom of it, the gorgeous, squalid, tearful, and mirthful pageantry, the reckless inconsequences, the flagrant impossibilities; to watch the Devil ramping up and down like a hungry lion, and to hear the young-eyed cherubim choiring from the skies: what better entertainment could the heart of man desire?"

Even the young-eyed cherubim, choiring on meadows of asphodel, might cease their harping for a time to listen to a tale of the vanished earth, told by that golden tongue. Some vague thought of this was in our minds as we looked at her; and somehow it comforted us. Not even the Judgment was so greatly to be feared if after it we were the SAME, our own precious little identities unchanged.

And as, long ago, the voice rang out at midnight along the Syrian shore, wailing that great Pan was dead, but in the same moment the choiring angels whispered, "Glory to God in the highest, for Christ is born," so, if the stern alarm of that April night seemed to many a wistful and loyal heart to portend the passing glory of British dominion and the tragical chance of war, it whispered to them with prophetic inspiration, "Good will to men; America is born!"

"She comrades with the child, the bird, the fern, Poet and sage and rustic chimney-nook, But Pomp must be a pilgrim ere he earn Her mountain look. "Her mountain look, the candor of the snow, The strength of folded granite, and the calm Of choiring pines, whose swayed green branches strow A healing balm.

But the strength and swirl of the water, its tireless force, its incessant voices choiring on a chorus of numberless notes, invited her, fascinated her, filled her with longing longing to trust herself to the waves, to lie still and let them rock her, to be borne out by them a little way and brought back again, passive yet in ecstatic enjoyment of the dreamy motion. The longing became an impulse.

Every cranny of his being was flooded with overmastering light and the faint sound of footsteps marking sinister time to his music, drew closer, closer. Shaking off an insane desire to join his voice in the immortal choiring of the Cherubim, Pobloff dashed into the passionate storm-scream of the music, and like a pack of phantom bloodhounds the footsteps pressed him in the race.