Our Church Choir by Pansy — Read

HANDEL BEETHOVEN SMITH proved to be of uncertain temper. At times he was sullen, or sarcastic, and he was always severe. He would not have this, and he would have that. He told the leading bass that his voice sounded like a trombone, without its correctness of pitch. He said the Emmons girls had harsh, grating voices, and that Carrie Fowler's singing reminded him of a certain rooster which used to disturb his morning slumbers. You hardly need to be told the results of all this. They became apparent to us by degrees. One by one the choir grew smaller. The leading bass accepted an invitation elsewhere. The Emmons girls felt their throats needed rest from regular singing. Cissy Burton decided that she preferred a seat by mamma. Poor Cissy was a nervous little thing, her mother said, quite unused to Mr. Smith's brusque ways; dear Mr. Pemberton had always been so considerate of people's feelings. It is true that Mr. Smith had been rather brusque. He told her savagely one day that she was always half a tone behind, and sang with no more expression than a hand-organ! Nor was it the choir alone, who were the subjects of these home thrusts. Handel Beethoven Smith carried things with a high hand in every direction. He told Dr. Powers, who asked to have the chant, "Suffer little children to come unto me," rendered the Sabbath after the funeral of his little child, that they had sung it but three Sabbaths before at somebody's request, and he couldn't afford to establish such a precedent as that; a leader of a choir couldn't be all the time practising funeral chants because people's babies would die. That "Suffer little children" was nothing but trash, anyway; ought never to be sung; he had strained a point to sing it once, and he didn't mean to get caught in that way again.

I must do Mr. Smith the justice to explain that when he called the chant in question "trash," he referred to the words, not the music. Words were the merest nothings to him; indeed, he had been heard to say that all music ought to be rendered in Italian, that the clumsiness of the English tongue might be lost sight of. Handel Beethoven Smith had a very cultivated ear.