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And so hearts that thought they knew themselves came upon ambushes of emotion and hidden indwellings of spirit not guessed before. Dora Yocum, listening to the "Star Spangled Banner," sung by children of immigrants to an out-of-tune old piano in a mission clubroom, in Chicago, found herself crying with a soul-shaking heartiness in a way different from other ways that she had cried.

Among them were men of education, graduates of universities both in America and abroad; you might hear one of the group about these camp-fires telling about slave-revolts in ancient Egypt and Greece; or quoting Strindberg and Stirner, or reciting a scene from Synge, or narrating how he had astounded the family of some lonely farm-house by playing Rachmaninoff's "Prelude" on a badly out-of-tune piano.

In all the region there was hardly a family with which some half-dozen of the battery were not acquainted, or even related. "Home again, home again from a foreign shore," sang the whole eighty-odd, every ladies' man of them, around out-of-tune pianos with girls whose brothers were all away in Georgia and Virginia, some forever at rest, some about to fight Chancellorsville.

The meeting was held in a little chapel built out like an architectural excrescence at the side of the great, oblong, wooden structure, with its piercing steeple. The chapel windows blazed with light. People were flocking in. As they entered, a young lady began to play on an out-of-tune piano, which Judge Josiah Saunders had presented to the church.

At last the dusty sun-blinds were taken off the windows of the big house, and Yefremovo heard the strains of the broken-down, out-of-tune piano. Father Kuzma was pining, though he could not himself have said why, or whether it was from delight or alarm. . . . The deacon went about grinning. The following Saturday evening Father Kuzma went to the sacristan's lodgings.

It would have been an absurd voice for ballads in a drawing-room, but it suited fiery declamations in praise of La Liberté! They were sitting in Emile's room now, for they made use of each other's lodgings alternately, and there was a battered and rather out-of-tune piano.

The glare and the oily smell of the lanterns, the odour of jasmine, frangipanni, vanilla, and human beings sickeningly mingled in the heat, the jangling, out-of-tune music, the wearisome island gossip and chatter, drove him at length out into the night, down a black-shadowed pathway to the sea.

And Father Roland had invited him to enter it. That was the curious part of the situation, as it was impressed upon him as he sat with his face flattened against the window. The Little Missioner had invited him, and the night was daring him. For a single moment the incongruity of it all made him forget himself, and he laughed a chuckling, half-broken, and out-of-tune sort of laugh.

Men rose and spoke and prayed, at intervals the out-of-tune piano was invoked. A woman behind Maria sang contralto with a curious effect, as if her head were in a tin-pail. There were odd, dull, metallic echoes about it which filled the whole chapel. The woman's daughter had some cheap perfume on her handkerchief, and she was incessantly removing it from her muff.