“That’s all very well,” said Number Seven, “but I wish we could get the old-time music back again.  You ought to have heard,—­no, I won’t mention her, dead, poor girl,—­dead and singing with the saints in heaven,—­but the S_____ girls.  If you could have heard them as I did when I was a boy, you would have cried, as we all used to.  Do you cry at those great musical smashes?  How can you cry when you don’t know what it is all about?  We used to think the words meant something,—­we fancied that Burns and Moore said some things very prettily.  I suppose you’ve outgrown all that.”

No one can handle Number Seven in one of his tantrums half so well as Number Five can do it.  She can pick out what threads of sense may be wound off from the tangle of his ideas when they are crowded and confused, as they are apt to be at times.  She can soften the occasional expression of half-concealed ridicule with which the poor old fellow’s sallies are liable to be welcomed—­or unwelcomed.  She knows that the edge of a broken teacup may be sharper, very possibly, than that of a philosopher’s jackknife.  A mind a little off its balance, one which has a slightly squinting brain as its organ; will often prove fertile in suggestions.  Vulgar, cynical, contemptuous listeners fly at all its weaknesses, and please themselves with making light of its often futile ingenuities, when a wiser audience would gladly accept a hint which perhaps could be developed in some profitable direction, or so interpret an erratic thought that it should prove good sense in disguise.  That is the way Number Five was in the habit of dealing with the explosions of Number Seven.  Do you think she did not see the ridiculous element in a silly speech, or the absurdity of an outrageously extravagant assertion?  Then you never heard her laugh when she could give way to her sense of the ludicrous without wounding the feelings of any other person.  But her kind heart never would forget itself, and so Number Seven had a champion who was always ready to see that his flashes of intelligence, fitful as they were, and liable to be streaked with half-crazy fancies, always found one willing recipient of what light there was in them.

Number Five, I have found, is a true lover of music, and has a right to claim a real knowledge of its higher and deeper mysteries.  But she accepted very cordially what our light-headed companion said about the songs he used to listen to.

“There is no doubt,” she remarked, “that the tears which used to be shed over ‘Oft in the sully night,’ or ‘Auld Robin Gray,’ or ’A place in thy memory, dearest,’ were honest tears, coming from the true sources of emotion.  There was no affectation about them; those songs came home to the sensibilities of young people,—­of all who had any sensibilities to be acted upon.  And on the other hand, there is a great amount of affectation in the apparent enthusiasm of many persons in admiring and applauding music of which they have