ten, Neighbor!" he cried out, descrying Tyler Sudley, who, indeed,
could do naught else--"_listen!_ Ye won't hear much better fiddlin' this
side o' kingdom come!" And with glad assurance he capered up and down,
the bow elongating the sound to a cadence of frenzied glee, as his arms
sought to accommodate the nimbler motions of his legs.

Thus it was the mountaineers later said that Leander fell into bad
company. For, the fiddle being forbidden in the sober Laurelia's house,
he must needs go elsewhere to show his gift and his growing skill,
and he found a welcome fast enough. Before he had advanced beyond his
stripling youth, his untutored facility had gained a rude mastery over
the instrument; he played with a sort of fascination and spontaneity
that endeared his art to his uncritical audiences, and his endowment was
held as something wonderful. And now it was that Laure-lia, hearing
him, far away in the open air, play once a plaintive, melodic strain,
fugue-like with the elfin echoes, felt a strange soothing in the sound,
found tears in her eyes, not all of pain but of sad pleasure, and
assumed thenceforth something of the port of a connoisseur. She said
she "couldn't abide a fiddle jes sawed helter-skelter by them ez hedn't
larned, but ter play saaft an' slow an' solemn, and no dancin' chune,
no frolic song--she warn't set agin that at all." And she desired of
Leander a repetition of this sunset motive that evening when he had come
home late, and she discovered him hiding the obnoxious instrument
under the porch. But in vain. He did not remember it. It was some vague
impulse, as unconsciously voiced as the dreaming bird's song in the
sudden half-awake intervals of the night. Over and again, as he stood by
the porch, the violin in his arms, he touched the strings tentatively,
as if, perchance, being so alive, they might of their own motion recall
the strain that had so lately thrilled along them:

He had grown tall and slender. He wore boots to his knees now, and
pridefully carried a "shoot-in'-iron" in one of the long legs--to his
great discomfort. The freckles of his early days were merged into the
warm uniform tint of his tanned complexion. His brown hair still
curled; his shirt-collar fell away from his throat, round and full and
white--the singer's throat--as he threw his head backward and cast his
large roving eyes searchingly along the sky, as if the missing strain
had wings.

The inspiration returned no more,