y view, Madelon would go off into some
dreamy fit, as she listened to the violinist, of whose playing
she never wearied. He was devoted to his art, though he had
never attained to any remarkable proficiency in it; and at any
hour of the day he might be heard scraping, and tuning, and
practising, for he belonged to the orchestra of one of the
theatres. It was quite a new sensation for Madelon to hear so
much music in private life, and she thought it all beautiful--
tuning and scraping and all.

"But that is all rubbish," the German would cry, after
spending an hour in going through some trashy modern Italian
music. "Now, my child, you shall hear something worth
listening to;" and with a sigh of relief he would turn to some
old piece by Mozart or Bach, some minuet of Haydn's, some
romance of Beethoven's, which he would play with no great
power of execution, indeed, but with a rare sweetness and
delicacy of touch and expression, and with an intense
absorption in the music, which communicated itself to even so
small a listener as Madelon.

It would have been hard to say which of the two had the more
enjoyment--she, as she sat motionless, her chin propped on her
two hands, her brown eyes gazing into space, and a hundred
dreamy fancies vaguely shaped by the music, flitting through
her brain; or he, as he bent over his violin, lovingly
exacting the sweet sounds, and his thoughts--who knows where? --
anywhere, one may be sure, rather than in the low-ceiled,
dusty garret, redolent of tobacco smoke, and not altogether
free from a suspicion of onions.

"There, my child," he would say at the end, "that is music--
that is art! What I was playing before was mere rubbish--trash,
unworthy of me and of my violin."

"And why do you play it?" asks Madelon, simply.

"Ah! why indeed?" said the violinist--"because one must live,
my little Frauelein; and since they will play nothing else at
the theatre, I must play it also, or I should be badly off."

"You are not rich, then?" said Madelon.

"Rich enough," he answered. "I gain enough to live upon, and I
ask no more."

"Why don't you make money like papa?" says Madelon; "then you
could play what you liked, you know. We are very rich
sometimes."

The old German screwed up his queer, kind, ugly face.

"It--it's not my way," he said drily. "As for money, I might
have had plenty by this time, if I had not run away from home
when I was a boy, because I preferred being a poor musici