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 descriptive. 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.
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