"There is a place," the boy would declaim loweringly, and with fitting gesture, with hypnotic eye fastened on the cowering Bernal, "where the only music is the symphony of damned souls. Where howling, groaning, moaning, and gnashing of teeth make up the horrible concert. There is a place where demons fly swift as air, with whips of knotted burning wire, torturing poor souls; where tongues on fire with agony burn the roofs of mouths that shriek in vain for drops of water--that water all denied. When thou diest, O Sinner--" But at this point the smaller boy usually became restless and would have to go to the kitchen for a drink of water. Always he became thirsty here. And he would linger over his drink till Clytie called him back to admire his brother in the closing periods. --"but at the resurrection thy soul will be united to thy body and then thou wilt have twin hells; body and soul will be tormented together, each brimful of agony, the soul sweating in its utmost pores drops of blood, thy body from head to foot suffused with pain, thy bones cracking in the fire, thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony, every nerve a string on which the devil shall play his diabolical tune of hell's unutterable torment." Here the little boy always listened at his wrist to know if his pulse rattled yet, and felt glad indeed that he was a Presbyterian, instead of being in that dreadful place with Jews and Papists and Milo Barrus, who spelled God with a little g. As to his own performance, Clytie found that he memorised prose with great difficulty. A week did she labour to teach him one brief passage from a lecture of Francis Murphy, depicting the fate of the drunkard. She bribed him to fresh effort with every carnal lure the pantry afforded, but invariably he failed at a point where the soul of the toper was going "down--_down_--DOWN--into the bottomless depths of HELL!" Here he became pitiful in his ineffectiveness, and Clytie had at last to admit that he would never be the elocutionist Allan was. "But, my Land!" she would say, at each of his failures, "if you only _could_ do it the way Mr. Murphy did--and then he'd talk so plain and natural, too,--just like he was associating with a body in their own parlour--and so pathetic it made a body simply bawl. My suz! how I did love to set and hear that man tell what a sot he'd been!" However, Clytie happily discovered that the littler boy's memory was more tenacious of rhyme, so she successfully taught him certain metrical conceits that had been her own to learn in girlhood, beginning with pithy couplets such as: "Xerxes the Great did die And so must you and I." "As runs the glass Man's life must pass." "Thy life to mend God's book attend." From these it was a step entirely practicable to longer warnings, one of her favourites being: UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE