to do duty at the altars, pausing near the church where the marshalled ranks of the boys’military school split cleanly into regimented Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians.
The children assembled in a big room adjacent to the church, honey— combed to right and left with small classrooms, which they entered after the preliminary service was finished. They were exhorted from the platform by the superintendent, a Scotch dentist with a black-gray beard, fringed by a small area of embalmed skin, whose cells, tissues, and chemical juices seemed to have been fixed in a state of ageless suspension, and who looked no older from one decade to another.
He read the text, or the parable of the day’s study, commented on it with Cæsarean dryness and concision, and surrendered the service to his assistant, a shaven, spectacled, Wilsonian-looking man, also Scotch, who smiled with cold affection at them over his high shiny collar, and led them through the verses of a hymn, heaving up his arms and leering at them encouragingly, as they approached the chorus. A sturdy spinstress thumped heavily upon a piano which shook like a leaf.
Eugene liked the high crystal voices of the little children, backed by the substantial marrow of the older boys and girls, and based on the strong volume of the Junior and Senior Baraccas and Philatheas. They sang:
"Throw out the lifeline, throw out the lifeline, Someone is sinking to-day-ee"—
on the mornings when the collection went for missionary work. And they sang:
"Shall we gather at the river, The bew-tee-ful, the bew-tee-ful r-hiver."
He liked that one very much. And the noble surge of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
Later, he went into one of the little rooms with his class. The sliding doors rumbled together all around; presently there was a quiet drone throughout the building.
He was now in a class composed entirely of boys. His teacher was a tall white-faced young man, bent and thin, who was known to
