"If you will close up the book, and think about me while you are playing, I will go back to the door, and listen. The subject is not very romantic, but it is lonely enough, Heaven knows. I should think the old organ might have sympathy with me, and do the subject justice, for it is shut up from day to day in a great stone house, as I am." Allan Dorris went back by the door, and the organ was still for such a length of time that he thought it very correctly represented the silence that hung over his house like a pall; but finally there was the thunder of the double-bass, and the music began. The instrument was an unusually good one, with a wide range of effects in the hands of such a player as Annie Benton proved to be; and Allan Dorris thought she must have learned his history somehow, and was now telling it to whoever cared to listen. Dirges! The air was full of them, with processions of mourning men and women. The girl seemed to have a fondness for odd airs, played in imitation of the lower and middle registers of the voice, with treble accompaniment, and the listener almost imagined that a strong baritone, the voice of an actor in a play, was telling in plain English why Allan Dorris, the occupant of The Locks, came to Davy's Bend, and why he was discontented and ill at ease. The actor with the baritone voice, after telling everything he knew, gave way for a march-movement, and a company of actors, representing all the people he had ever known, appeared before him under the magic of the music. Some of them looked in wonder, others in dread and fear, as they passed him in procession; but the march kept them going, and their places were soon taken by others, from the store in his memory, who looked in wonder, and in dread and fear, at the strange man in the back pew, though he was no stranger to them. Not by any means; they knew him very well. What an army! They are still coming, flinging their arms to the time of the march; but the moment they arrive they look toward the back pew, and continue looking that way, until they disappear; as though they have been looking for him, and are surprised at his presence in that quiet place. After a pause, to arrange the stops, the music sounded as if all those who had appeared were trying to make their stories heard at once. Their hatred, their dread, their fear,--all were represented in the chords which he was now hearing, but in the din there was nothing cheerful or joyous. If any of the actors in the play he had been witnessing knew anything to the credit of Allan Dorris, their voices were so mild as to be drowned by the fiercer ones with stories of hate and fear and dread. The music at last died away with the double-bass, as it began, and the player sat perfectly still after she had finished; nor did Dorris move from his position for several minutes.