A guest would hold it reverently a moment, then glance up in search of some one to whom it might be heartily extended.
This over, the elder Miss Eubanks--Marcella of the severe mien--sang interestingly, "I gathered Shells upon the Shore," and for an encore, in response to eager demands, "Comin' thro' the Rye." Not coyly did she give this, with inciting, blushing implications, but rather with an unbending, disapproving sternness, as if with intent to divert the minds of her listeners from the song's frank ribaldry to its purely musical values.
Eustace followed with a solo:-- "Nigh to a grave that was newly made, Leaned a sexton old on his earth-worn spade." In the very low parts, where the sexton old is required to say, "I gather them in," he was most effective, and many of his more susceptible hearers shuddered.

For an encore he sang, "I am the old Turnkey," which goes lower and lower with deliberate steps until it descends to incredible depths of bassness.
It was a rare comfort to the Eubanks ladies that Eustace was a bass instead of a tenor.

They had observed that most tenor songs are of a suggestive and meretricious character.

Arthur Updyke, for example, who clerked in the city drug store, was a tenor, and nearly all of his songs were distressingly sentimental; indeed, fairly indelicate at times in their lack of reserve about kisses and embraces and sighs and ecstasies.
Glad indeed were the guardians of Eustace that his voice had lowered to a salutary depth, and that bass songs in general were pure and innocent,--songs of death, of dungeons, of honest war, or of diving beneath the deep blue sea--down, down, down, as far as the singer's chest tones permitted.

With "Euty" a tenor, warbling those pernicious boudoir _chansons_ of moonlight and longing of sighing love and anguished passion, they suspected that he would have been harder to manage.