HUBANUS. “_Ma foi!_ I do not know. (_Aside._) I hope they do, if old fogies like you are going to stir up _that_ question. (_To Gregorius._) No lady‐singers! If that were to happen, my occupation, as well as theirs, would be like Othello’s—gone. For hark you, Brother Gregorius, although I know but little of your old‐fashioned, barbarous chant—can’t read a note of it, to tell the truth—if women‐singers are banished from the choir, music goes with them. The music I like requires the female voice. I wouldn’t waste my time with a parcel of boys and on such music as they can sing.” GREGORIUS. “What music is this of which you speak so often? Hath the church adopted a new style of melody which is not chant?” HUBANUS. “No, not adopted precisely, but there is a new music—everybody knows it—written by Mozart, Haydn, Mercadante, Peters, and several others, which organists and choirs make use of in our day. Some prefer one, some another, according to taste. ‘De gustibus,’ you know.” GREGORIUS. “Yet tell me—for here the strangeness of your news almost surpasses belief—how _dare_ the organists and choirs make use of _any_ melody in accompanying the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and absolving the Divine Office which has not been adopted, or at least distinctly sanctioned, by holy church, to whom it appertains to dispose the ordering even of the most minute rubric in these important matters concerning the due praise of God and the sure edification of the people?” HUBANUS. “All I can say is, we do it. It is tolerated in some places, and my friend in his paper quotes some ‘Instructions’ which the cardinal vicar in Rome issued to his own clergy to prove the toleration; but, to my thinking, they sound very much like the careful mother’s permission to her boy who asked leave to learn to swim—‘Certainly, my child, but don’t you never go near the water, leastways any water that is over your ankles.’ ” GREGORIUS. “I think I understand, for I have heard our good father, the abbot, say that ‘he who would be well carried must not drive with too stiff a rein’; and my holy novice‐master, Father Ambrose—to whose soul may God grant rest!—did oft chide my hasty judgment upon my fellow‐novices, saying in his sweet way, and after the manner of his wise speech, ‘Thou wouldst _re_form monks, good Brother Gregorius, before they are formed. All they need is a little _instruction_.’ At present every one is well pleased with your music?”