fiddle. A year found him
back in Melbourne, penniless. Here he met another German in the same
condition. They decided to work their way overland to Sydney, Hans
playing the fiddle and his mate singing. Then began a Bohemian life of
music by the wayside inns, sleep in the open air, and meals when it
pleased God to send them.

This had proved to be the solitary sunlit passage in his life, for when
he reached Sydney he found that his music had no money value, and,
under the goad of hunger, took to the trade that he had learned so
unwillingly. Twenty years ago he had opened his small shop on the
Botany Road, and to-day it remained unchanged, dwarfed by larger
buildings on either side. He lived by himself in the room over the
shop, where he spent his time reading the newspaper as a child spells
out a lesson, or playing his beloved violin. He was a good player, but
his music was a puzzle and a derision to Jonah, for his tastes were
classical, and sometimes he spent as much as a shilling on a back seat
at a concert in the Town Hall. Jonah scratched his ear and listened,
amazed that a man could play for hours without finding a tune. The
neighbours said that Paasch lived on the smell of an oil rag; but that
was untrue, for he spent hours cooking strange messes soaked in
vinegar, the sight of which turned Jonah's stomach.

Bob Fenner's dance-room, three doors away, was a thorn in his side.
Three nights in the week a brazen comet struck into a set of lancers,
drowning the metallic thud of the piano and compelling his ear to
follow the latest popular air to the last bar.

His solitary life, his fiddling, and his singular mixture of gruffness
and politeness had bred legends among the women of the neighbourhood.
He was a German baron, who had forfeited his title and estates through
killing a man in a duel; and never a milder pair of eyes looked timidly
through spectacles. He was a famous musician, who had chosen to blot
himself out of the world for love of a high-born lady; and, in his
opinion, women were useful to cook and sew, nothing more.

CHAPTER 4

JONAH DISCOVERS THE BABY

Joey the pieman had scented a new customer in Mrs Yabsley, and on the
following Saturday night he stopped in front of the house and rattled
the lids of his cans to attract her attention. His voice, thin and
cracked with the wear of the streets, chanted his familiar cry to an
accompaniment faintly suggestive of clashing cymbals:

"P