It was a rare comfort to the Eubanks ladies that Eustace was a bass instead of a tenor. They had observed that most tenor songs are of a suggestive and meretricious character. Arthur Updyke, for example, who clerked in the city drug store, was a tenor, and nearly all of his songs were distressingly sentimental; indeed, fairly indelicate at times in their lack of reserve about kisses and embraces and sighs and ecstasies. Glad indeed were the guardians of Eustace that his voice had lowered to a salutary depth, and that bass songs in general were pure and innocent,--songs of death, of dungeons, of honest war, or of diving beneath the deep blue sea--down, down, down, as far as the singer's chest tones permitted. With "Euty" a tenor, warbling those pernicious boudoir _chansons_ of moonlight and longing of sighing love and anguished passion, they suspected that he would have been harder to manage. Even as it was, he had once brought home a most dreadful thing called "A Bedouin Love Song," for a bass voice, truly enough, but so fearfully outspoken about matters far better left unmentioned among nice people that the three girls had fled horrified from the room after that first verse:-- "From the desert I come to thee, On a stallion shod with fire, And the wind is left behind In the speed of my desire." The mother sped to her daughters' appeal for help and required her son to sing "The Lost Chord" as a febrifuge. The other song was confiscated after the mother had read the words so unblushingly penned by an author whom she ever afterward deemed an abandoned profligate. She considered that Bedouins must be unspeakable creatures--but how much lower the mind that could portray their depravity, and send it out into the world for innocent young men to carol in the homes of our best people! Thereafter Eustace sang only songs that had been censored by his family, and his repertoire was now stainless, containing no song in which a romantic attachment was even hinted at; but only those reciting wholesome adventures, military and marine, pastoral scenes and occupations, or the religious experience of the singer. In the words of the _Argus_, "his powerful singing was highly enjoyed by all present." There followed the feature of the evening,--a paper read by Mrs. Potts; subject, "The Message of Emerson." With an agreeable public manner the lady erected herself at one corner of a square piano, placed her manuscripts under the shaded lamp, and began. The subject, aforetime made known among us, had been talked about and perhaps a little wondered at. It is certain, at least, that Westley Keyts had yielded to the urging of his good wife to be present in the belief that a man named Emerson had sent Mrs. Potts a telegram to be read to us. This was what "the message of Emerson" meant to Westley, and the novelty of it had seemed to justify what he called "togging up," after a hard day's work at the slaughter-house.