It was there I learned that Copenhagen was the church precentor, and had his little vices, whereof our folks at home, with wisdom and delicacy, had never given us a hint. He used to come down to town each Sunday in a pair of tightly-strapped breeches, a black surtout, and what we called a three-storey hat. The preacher chose the psalm, but it was Copenhagen chose the tune. He had but half a dozen airs in all his repertory—Selma, Dundee, Martyrdom, Coleshill, and Dunfermline, and what he called “yon one of my own.” I have sometimes been to the opera since; I fear, from knowledge gained by that experience, that the old man was not highly gifted for vocalism. Invariably he started on too high a key, and found that he had done so only when a bar or two was finished. With imperturbability unfailing, he just stopped short, and, leaning over his desk, said to the congregation, “We’ll have another try at it, lads!” The service was an English one, but this touching confidence was in Gaelic, and addressed particularly to the men who, married or single, sat apart from the women. While Copenhagen still led the praise to Coleshill and “yon one of his own,” a pestilent innovator came to the place who knew music, and, unhappily, introduced a band of enterprising youths to the mysteries of harmony. He taught them bass and alto, and showed them how the melody of Dundee and Coleshill could be embellished and improved by those. The first Sunday these vocalists started to display their new art in the church, Copenhagen stopped in the middle of a verse to make a protest. “I’ll have none of your boom-boom singing here to put me all reel-rall,” said he, “nor praising of the Lord with such theatricals,” then baffled them by changing the air to “yon one of his own.” A bachelor by prejudice and conviction, he liked to hear of marriages, and when the “cries” were read he had for long—until a new incumbent made a protest—a cheerful, harmless habit of crying at the end of the announcement, “I have no objections to’t whatever.”