Lionel promising not to betray Arthur’s confidence, laughed at the artist’s notion that he was indulging in an utterly hopeless and futile passion. “I suppose you will be at the Festival of the Three Choirs to-morrow,” said Mr. Hammerton by-and-by, when they had changed the subject and he had lighted his last cigar. “I shall be in some part of the building,” Arthur said. “I have the _entrée_ you know by certain private doors; I am rather a favourite with the Dean and Chapter. I look down upon you from arches high up aloft, I listen to the music at various points. I should be too restless to sit all the time squeezed up amongst the audience.” Severntown, you must know, was celebrated for its Festival Concerts in the cathedral, which had been originated as early as 1724, resulting in noble collections for charitable purposes, and of which the local journalist a hundred years ago exclaimed, “May God grant that all charitable undertakings may be carried on with that becoming zeal and Ardency of Affection which Matters of such allow’d Importance must always very justly claim!” Newspaper writers in those days, you see, said what they had to say briefly, and tersely, and to the point. I mention these Severntown Festivals not with any intention of describing one of them, but simply because of the train of thought which the mention of the event by Mr. Hammerton excited in the mind of Arthur Phillips. It was at the Festival, three years previously, that Arthur had first seen Phœbe Tallant, a mere girl, but of such striking beauty that the image was fixed in his mind, as if it belonged to the glorious music,--sanctified by the time, and the place, and the holy strains. And he had gone on the following day, and peered out amongst the throng to see the same face again, but he saw it not; so he went quietly alone into the Lady Chapel to think of it, and build up the image in a picture of angels which he had thought, more than once, of painting. He never forgot the varied sensations which had been excited within him by that solitary ramble through private corridors into the Lady Chapel. Shakspeare, Milton, and Pope have sung the delights of “hidden music.” Who has not stood at night in some quiet churchyard with his thoughts reverentially turned to heaven by the solemn strains of an evening hymn rippling out through the half-open doorway? Who has not sat without the precincts of cathedral choirs and felt the power of religious strains move him more deeply than when in the presence of the choristers? Is it that the mind likes to fall back upon itself now and then, to wed the music to its own hopes and aspirations?