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Hence, "we find the same elements repeated, the psalms generally chanted in the form of responses, that is to say, by one or more cantors, the choir repeating one verse which served as a response, alternately with the verses of the psalms, which were sung by the cantors, readings taken from the Old and the New Testaments and, later on, from the works of the Fathers and Doctors; litanies, supplications, prayers for divers members of the Church, clergy, faithful, neophytes and catechumens; for emperors, travellers; the sick; and generally for all the necessities of the Church, and even for Jews and for heretics.
The cantors, in all the dignity of their white surplices, went on in somewhat uncertain voices, and the reed stop itself seemed hoarse, as if the instrument had been weeping; the priest, however, raised his hand to command silence and went and stood on the chancel steps, when everybody was silent at once.
It was a strange fantasia that poured itself through his obedient fingers; it held the wistful chants of ancient ritual, the festival roulades and plaintive yearnings of melodious cantors, the sing-song augmentation of Talmud-students oscillating in airless study-houses, the long, melancholy drone of Psalm-singers in darkening Sabbath twilights, the rustle of palm-branches and sobbings of penitence, the long-drawn notes of the ram's horn pealing through the Terrible Days, the passionate proclamation of the Unity, storming the gates of heaven.
The same mould covers them all those who donated guineas and those who donated "gifts," the rogues and the hypocrites, and the wedding-drolls, the observant and the lax, the purse-proud and the lowly, the coarse and the genteel, the wonderful chapmen and the luckless Schlemihls, Rabbi and Dayan and Shochet, the scribes who wrote the sacred scroll and the cantors who trolled it off mellifluous tongues, and the betting-men who never listened to it; the grimy Russians of the capotes and the earlocks, and the blue-blooded Dons, "the gentlemen of the Mahamad," who ruffled it with swords and knee-breeches in the best Christian society.
The cure walked, with an acolyte on either side of him, to one end of the boat, while at the other end, the three old cantors, in their white surplices, with a serious air and their eyes fixed on the psalter, sang at the top of their voices in the clear morning air.
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