MASSEY COLLEGE

Thank you for your letter of December 29th and for the photographs of St. James Church which I remember well, and of the house in which I was born, now changed out of all recognition.

You ask about the organ in the church and all I can remember about it is that it had what was called "a tracker action"; this meant that the stops activated long rods which were connected with the pipes and opened and shut them. Although this is a very old way of constructing an organ, it has its difficulties because sometimes the rods broke and at other times they stuck, in which case one note continued to sound until the trouble was put right, which could be quite a long time. In my parents' day this happened very often and my mother used to describe an occasion when the "ciphering" went on for some time and interrupted the sermon. My father, who was the choir master, and John Howat, who was the chief elder, crept behind the organ and proceeded to climb around its works to discover the source of the trouble. Unfortunately they forgot that everything they said could be heard plainly in the church and there was rather a lot of "Have you found anything?"; "Where are you?"; "I'm up here, where are you?" and this conversation brought the sermon, by the Rev. Arthur Boyd, to a somewhat miserable halt. It could take up to half an hour to find out which pipe was ciphering.

I suppose now that the action has been changed to electricity and this kind of low comedy no longer happens.

With good wishes, I am

Yours sincerely,

Mrs. Shirley Bain
Thamesville, Ontario.