His passion for music was hardly less pronounced, and this he inherited from his mother, and exercised to his heart's content in the choir of the Baptist Church.
These were the bright lines and spots in his strenuous young life.

He played and sang the gathering brood of cares out of his own and his mother's heart.

He needed to play and he needed to sing to charm away from his spirit the vulture of poverty.

That evil bird hovered ever over his childhood.

It was able to do many hard things to him, break up his home, sunder him from his mother, force him at a tender age to earn his bread, still there was another bird in the boy's heart, which sang out of it the shadow and into it the sunshine.