If some of the Ganos had of late been mightily earnest in their religious experiences, they had long been "musical" in a pottering kind of way. They would have assured you more than half seriously that music was a "pottering" pursuit--a pastime for boating-parties on the Potomac or rainy evenings at home, not for a moment to be regarded as a profession, except for long-haired foreigners. Mrs. John, or, as she now called herself, "Mrs. Sarah C. Gano," accepted this point of view cheerfully enough, as she had not a note of music in her. Her children's passion for singing and playing came early under the head of "noise," and under the ban of her displeasure. Therefore, when it was discovered that the eldest boy had done badly in his third year at Dr. Baylis's Academy for Young Gentlemen, and that Dr. Baylis accounted for his pet pupil's falling off by saying the boy played the piano, and even wrote music, when he should have been doing mathematics, great was the mother's disappointment in her son, and renewed objection to the Art Divine. Ethan came home for his holidays in disgrace. It was significant of the mastery Mrs. Gano had obtained over her not unspirited children that, without being formally forbidden to play at home, Ethan never dared touch the piano the whole vacation through. It was this privation, he used to say later on, that drove him into the Church. He had got beyond the banjo and singing with the blacks down in the negro quarter. He longed for the coming of that day in the week when he might hear the sound of the organ, and even such a choir as they had at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Catawbaville, where, the Baptist phase having been painfully passed, the entire family now went to church twice every Sunday, rain or shine. Ethan made friends with the rector, and whether out of gratitude for the Rev. Mr. Searle's permission to practise in the church, or from the reflection that Holy Orders presented a means of combining a livelihood with an organ, the upshot was that Ethan presently became a student of Divinity. At the beginning of his last year at the Theological School at Baltimore, he fell in love with a pretty Boston girl who had come South on a visit to a school friend. For the first time in his life flatly disobeying his mother's wishes, he married the little lady forthwith. Under conditions of great privation, they took up life in Baltimore till Ethan should be ordained. Ten months afterwards a son opened his eyes upon the world, and the girl-wife closed hers forever.