required all her cheerful earnestness, but now went on again at
the name; "it goes with my thoughts when I think, and it goes with my
tunes when I hum any, and _that's_ not work. Why, you yourself thought
it was music, you know, sir. And so it is, to me."

"Everything is!" cried Lamps, radiantly. "Everything is music to her,
sir."

"My father is, at any rate," said Phoebe, exultingly pointing her thin
forefinger at him. "There is more music in my father than there is in a
brass band."

"I say! My dear! It's very fillyillially done, you know; but you are
flattering your father," he protested, sparkling.

"No I am not, sir, I assure you. No I am not. If you could hear my
father sing, you would know I am not. But you never will hear him sing,
because he never sings to any one but me. However tired he is, he always
sings to me when he comes home. When I lay here long ago, quite a poor
little broken doll, he used to sing to me. More than that, he used to
make songs, bringing in whatever little jokes we had between us. More
than that, he often does so to this day. O! I'll tell of you, father, as
the gentleman has asked about you. He is a poet, sir."

"I shouldn't wish the gentleman, my dear," observed Lamps, for the moment
turning grave, "to carry away that opinion of your father, because it
might look as if I was given to asking the stars in a molloncolly manner
what they was up to. Which I wouldn't at once waste the time, and take
the liberty, my dear."

"My father," resumed Phoebe, amending her text, "is always on the bright
side, and the good side. You told me just now, I had a happy
disposition. How can I help it?"

"Well! but my dear," returned Lamps argumentatively, "how can _I_ help
it? Put it to yourself, sir. Look at her. Always as you see her now.
Always working--and after all, sir, for but a very few shillings a
week--always contented, always lively, always interested in others, of
all sorts. I said, this moment, she was always as you see her now. So
she is, with a difference that comes to much the same. For, when it's my
Sunday off and the morning bells have done ringing, I hear the prayers
and thanks read in the touchingest way, and I have the hymns sung to
me--so soft, sir, that you couldn't hear 'em out of this room--in notes
that seem to me, I am sure, to come from Heaven and go back to it."

It might have been merely through the association of these words with
their sacredly