Oh, the little old red school-house on the hill, (2d bass: On the hill.)Oh, the little old red school-house on the hill, (2d bass: On the hi-hi-hi-yull)And my heart with joy o'erflows, Like the dew-drop in the rose,*Thinking of the old red SCHOOL-HOUSE I o-o-on the hill, (2d tenor and 1st bass: The hill, the hill.)THE MALE QUARTET'S COMPENDIUM.
* I call your attention to the chaste beauty of this line, and the imperative necessity of the chord of the diminished seventh for the word "rose." Also "school-house" in the last line must be very loud and staccato. Snap it off.
If the audience will kindly come forward and occupy the vacant seats in the front of the hall, the entertainment will now begin. The male quartet will first render an appropriate selection and then . . . .
Can't you see them from where you are? Let me assist you in the visualization.
The first tenor, the gentleman on the extreme left, is a stocky little man, with a large chest and short legs conspicuously curving inward. He has plenty of white teeth, ash-blonde hair, and goes smooth-shaven for purely personal reasons. His round, dough-colored face will never look older (from a distance) than it did when he was nine. The flight of years adds only deeper creases in the multitude of fine wrinkles, and increasing difficulty in hoisting his tiny, patent-leather foot up on his plump knee.
The second tenor leans toward him in a way to make another man anxious about his watch, but the second tenor is as honest as the day. He is only "blending the voices." He works in the bank. He is going to be married in June sometime. Don't look around right away, but she's the one in the pink shirt-waist, the second one from the aisle, the one . . . two . . . three . . . the sixth row back. See her? Say, they've got it bad, those two. What d'
ye think? She goes down by the bank every day at noon, so as to walk up with him to luncheon. She lives across the street, and as soon as ever she has finished her luncheon, there she is, out on the front porch hallooing: "Oo-hoo!" How about that? And if he so much as looks at another girl - m-M!
The first bass is one of these fellows with a flutter in his voice.
No, I don't mean a vibrato. It's a flutter, like a goat's tail.
It is considered real operatic.
The second bass has a great, big Adam's apple that slides up and down his throat like a toy-monkey on a stick. He is tall, and has eyebrows like clothes-brushes, and he scowls fit to make you run and hide under the bed. He is really a good-hearted fellow, though.
Pity he has the dyspepsia so bad. Oh, my, yes! Suffers everything with it, poor man. He generally sings that song about "Drink-ing!
DRINK-ang! Drink-awng!" though he's strictly temperate himself.
When he takes that last low note, you hold on to your chair for fear you'll fall in too.
But why bring in the male quartet?
Because "The Little Old Red School-house" is more than a mere collocation of words, accurately deive. It is what Mat King would call a "symblem," and as such requires the music's dying fall to lull and enervate a too meticulous and stringent tendency to recollect that it wasn't little, or old, or red, or on a hill. It might have been big and new, and built of yellow brick, right next to the Second Presbyterian, and hence close to the "branch," so that the spring freshets flooded the playground, and the water lapped the base of the big rock on which we played "King on the Castle," -the big rock so pitifully dwindled of late years. No matter what he facts are. Sing 'of "The Little Old Red Schoolhouse On the Hill"and in everybody's heart a chord trembles in unison. As we hear its witching strains, we are all lodge brethren, from Maine to California and far across the Western Sea; we are all lodge brethren, and the air is "Auld Lang Syne," and we are clasping hands across, knitted together into one living solidarity; and this, if we but sensed it, is the real Union, of which the federal compact is but the outward seeming. It is a Union in which they have neither art nor part whose parents sent them to private schools, so as not to have them associate with "that class of people." It is the true democracy which batters down the walls that separate us from each other -the walls of caste distinction, and color prejudice, and national hatred, and religious contempt, all the petty, anti-social meannesses that quarrel with"The Union of hearts, the Union of hands, And the flag of our Union forever."Old Glory has floated victoriously on many a gallant fight by sea and land, but never do its silver stars glitter more bravely or its blood-red stripes curve more proudly on the fawning breeze than when it floats above the school-house, over the daily battle against ignorance and prejudice (which is ignorance of our fellows), for freedom and for equal rights. It is no mere pretty sentimentality that puts the flag there, but the serious recognition of the bed-rock principle of our Union: That we are all of one blood, one bounden duty; that all these anti-social prejudices are just as shameful as illiteracy, and that they must disappear as soon as ever we shall come to know each other well. Knowledge is power. That is true.
And it is also true: A house divided against itself cannot stand.
"The Flag of our Union forever!" is our prayer, our heart's desire for us and for our children after us. Heroes have died to give us that, heroes that with glazing eyes beheld the tattered ensign and spent their latest breath to cheer it as it passed on to triumph.
