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A harmless musical taste, and a disposition to instruct the young boy choristers, was equally balanced by great skill in horsemanship and the personal management of a ranche of wild cattle on the inland plains.
In the cloisters he was overtaken by the choristers, who were hastening back to the schoolroom. At the same moment Ketch, the porter, passed, coming towards them from the south entrance of the cloisters. He touched his hat in his usual ungracious fashion to the dean and Dr. Gardner, who were turning into the chapter-house, carrying their trenchers, and looked the other way as he passed the boys.
Some of the lay clerks had been choristers themselves, and amongst them was one who had been especially noted, as a boy for his birdlike treble. It seemed a thousand pities when it broke; but as he reached maturity, he found himself able to sing again, and eventually he developed a very true, if not very powerful tenor voice, and rose in time to be the leading tenor in the choir.
There were two or three pretty faces among the female singers, to which the keen air of a frosty morning had given a bright rosy tint; but the gentlemen choristers had evidently been chosen, like old Cremona fiddles, more for tone than looks; and as several had to sing from the same book, there were clusterings of odd physiognomies, not unlike those groups of cherubs we sometimes see on country tombstones.
I thank thee for the enjoyment of many an hour of nothingness; and thine, Santa Barbara, for many of a more intellectual cast! May the voice of thy chapel-organ continue unrivalled but by the voices of thy lovely choristers! and may the piano in thy refectory be replaced by a better, in which the harmony of strings may supersede the clattering of ivories!
Lady Ashton's interruption of their happiness and the subsequent parting have a vigorous dramatic effect. The character of Lucy has been much strengthened, so that it differs from that of the original precisely as Desdemona differs from Ophelia; and the change is an improvement. The fourth act opens with "a song of choristers heard outside." The letters of Lucy and Edgar have been intercepted.
During my sojourn in that city, it was announced that the nuns of a certain convent were to sing at Ave Maria, in a church adjoining the Piazza di Spagna; and I went thither to hear them. The choristers I did not see; they sat in a remote gallery, behind a screen.
And, after the mass, his Holiness, still standing at the altar, in person started the Te Deum, which the singers of the Sixtine Chapel and the other choristers took up, each party chanting a verse alternately. But soon the whole congregation joined them, forty thousand voices were raised, and a hymn of joy and glory spread through the vast nave with incomparable splendour of effect.
Choristers, in the most elaborate dress, swinging incense holders by delicate metal chains and bearing lanterns on long poles, surrounded the lofty cross. Every one of distinction in Augsburg, all the children who attended school, and all the members of the various ecclesiastical orders and guilds in the city marched before the bier. Kuni had never seen such a funeral procession.
On the following day he sent the two girls to a M. Choron, who was the head of the Conservatory of Sacred Music. Choron had Sarah sing, and instantly admitted her as a pupil, which meant that she would soon be enrolled among the regular choristers. The beauty of her voice made a deep impression on him. Then he happened to notice the puny, meager child who was standing near her sister.
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