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 200 INTRODUCTION

buds. Last night I saw her at Mr. Hoar's, only herself and Miss E. Hoar, G. P. Bradford, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson, and myself and Mr. Hoar. She played Beethoven, sang the 'Adelaide' serenade, 'Fischer Madchen,' 'Amid this Green Wood.' I walked home under the low, heavy gray clouds, but the echo lingered about me like starlight."

One more testimony to the peculiarly ethereal quality of Miss Randall's music, which I never heard equalled, much less surpassed, I venture to extract from a letter of my sister, sure of her forgiveness beforehand : " I see that dear Belinda is released, and rejoice for her. But how many thoughts of long past times it brings vividly before one, with her unfailing delicate kindness and thoughtful- ness for us all ! I can see her now at the piano, as she gently swayed with the feeling of her music, and can hear her sweet voice in ' Waft her, angels, through the skies ! ' — the song for which father always asked." That song from Handel's "Jephthah," which I had not happened to hear since Miss Randall used to sing it, forty years before, I heard at a Symphony Concert Rehearsal in Music Hall only a fortnight after her death, and the marvellous sweet- ness of its melody came as a fitting last farewell from a world unconscious of what it had lost to one of the sweetest lives it had ever held.

" Waft her, angels, through the skies, Far above yon azure plain, Glorious there, like you, to rise, There, like you, forever reign — Waft her, angels, through the skies ! "

In truth, every member of the Randall family was ex- ceptionally musical. John used to say that Maria, the beautiful sister who, to his passionate regret, died of con-

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