touch of the weird
and wizardly in it. Personally he was not ill-favoured, though rather un-
English, his complexion being a rich olive, his rank hair dark and rather
clammy--made still clammier by secret ointments, which, when he came
fresh to a party, caused him to smell like 'boys'-love' (southernwood)
steeped in lamp-oil. On occasion he wore curls--a double row--running
almost horizontally around his head. But as these were sometimes
noticeably absent, it was concluded that they were not altogether of
Nature's making. By girls whose love for him had turned to hatred he had
been nicknamed 'Mop,' from this abundance of hair, which was long enough
to rest upon his shoulders; as time passed the name more and more
prevailed.

His fiddling possibly had the most to do with the fascination he
exercised, for, to speak fairly, it could claim for itself a most
peculiar and personal quality, like that in a moving preacher. There
were tones in it which bred the immediate conviction that indolence and
averseness to systematic application were all that lay between 'Mop' and
the career of a second Paganini.

While playing he invariably closed his eyes; using no notes, and, as it
were, allowing the violin to wander on at will into the most plaintive
passages ever heard by rustic man. There was a certain lingual character
in the supplicatory expressions he produced, which would well nigh have
drawn an ache from the heart of a gate-post. He could make any child in
the parish, who was at all sensitive to music, burst into tears in a few
minutes by simply fiddling one of the old dance-tunes he almost entirely
affected--country jigs, reels, and 'Favourite Quick Steps' of the last
century--some mutilated remains of which even now reappear as nameless
phantoms in new quadrilles and gallops, where they are recognized only by
the curious, or by such old-fashioned and far-between people as have been
thrown with men like Wat Ollamoor in their early life.

His date was a little later than that of the old Mellstock quire-band
which comprised the Dewys, Mail, and the rest--in fact, he did not rise
above the horizon thereabout till those well-known musicians were
disbanded as ecclesiastical functionaries. In their honest love of
thoroughness they despised the new man's style. Theophilus Dewy (Reuben
the tranter's younger brother) used to say there was no 'plumness' in
it--no bowing, no solidity--it was all fantastical. And probably th