"An' 'aven't ye a Scotch sang, me laddie?" asked an old fellow, knocking the ashes from his pipe against the window-sill. "My Ain Countrie" followed. As the music floated, the thick smoke of the room seemed to drift away. The land of birds and beauty lay before eyes that for months and years had looked only upon the crowded misery of slumdom. When the voice ceased the illusion continued for a while in spite of the picking sleet at the window-panes. At length the silence was broken by a voice that came from a distant corner of the room. It repeated the last verse in tones as pure as those of Vox himself, though a high tenor in quality. Some of the notes were broken by hiccups. Vox looked in amazement at the singer--a half-drunken youngish man curled nearly double in a chair which was tipped back against the wall. His battered derby and unscraped chin did not effectually disguise the handsome fellow beneath them. He was like the Apollo Belvedere when first exhumed from the mud of Antium. "Who are you, my friend?" asked Vox, in as kindly a tone as his surprise allowed. "Friend? (hic) haven't got any friend," replied the man; and he struck up the verse that had just been rendered. His voice was husky at first, but after a few notes it clarified itself, as brooks do in running. His tones became marvelously sweet, touching the highest note without the slightest suggestion of falsetto. It was a transcendent voice, one that might have once belonged to some spirit, and gone astray among men. The singer went through the verse this time without hiccup or slur; but the instant he stopped the drunk resumed its sway. Down came the chair with a bump on to its front legs, which sent the man headlong into the arms of Vox, with whom he wanted to fight. "I won't fight you," said Vox, helping him back to his seat; "but I'll dare you to sing with me." "Sin' wi' you! 'Cept your challenge. I can whip you with my--my tongue (hic) as bad as my wife she (hic) whipped me with her (hic) tongue." "What shall we sing, old boy?" inquired Vox, with that easy familiarity which showed that he had seen such customers before. "Sin' a song o' sispence, Pocket full o' rye," sang the man. "Say, what's the use o' havin' your pocket full o' rye (hic)? 'D rather have a belly full o' rye; wouldn't you (hic)?" "You've enough rye in you for to-night," said Vox. "Come, pull the cork out of your throat, and let's have a song." Vox got a chair, and tipped it back by the side of the maudlin fellow, then struck up Mazzini's two-part song, "The Muleteers." The stranger joined in. Such singing was never heard before nor since in Brady's Harbor, nor, for that matter, in Carnegie Hall. After a bar or two the men rose to their feet and stood with arms interlocked and heads touching as their voices soared in the grand finale.