at by
and have a swill o' oatmeal and water, and turn in."

"It's too hot to go to bed. I couldn't sleep. I'm all right. I'll--I'll
just finish this. Just reach me a drink from the water-bag--the
pannikin's on the hob there, by your boot."

He scratched his head helplessly, and reached for the drink. When he
sat down again, he felt strangely restless. "Like a hen that didn't know
where to lay," he put it. He couldn't settle down or keep still, and
didn't seem to enjoy his pipe somehow. He rubbed his head again.

"There's a thunderstorm comin'," he said. "That's what it is; and the
sooner it comes the better."

He went to the back door, and stared at the blackness to the east, and,
sure enough, lightning was blinking there.

"It's coming, sure enough; just hang out and keep cool for another hour,
and you'll feel the difference."

He sat down again on the three-legged stool, folded his arms, with his
elbows on his knees, drew a long breath, and blinked at the clay floor
for a while; then he twisted the stool round on one leg, until he faced
the old-fashioned spired wooden clock (the brass disc of the pendulum
moving ghost-like through a scarred and scratched marine scene--Margate
in England--on the glass that covered the lower half) that stood alone
on the slab shelf over the fireplace. The hands indicated half-past
two, and Johnny, who had studied that clock and could "hit the time nigh
enough by it," after knitting his brows and blinking at the dial for a
full minute by its own hand, decided "that it must be getting on toward
nine o'clock."

It must have been the heat. Johnny stood up, raking his hair, turned to
the door and back again, and then, after an impatient gesture, took up
his fiddle and raised it to his shoulder. Then the queer thing happened.
He said afterwards, under conditions favourable to such sentimental
confidence, that a cold hand seemed to take hold of the bow, through
his, and--anyway, before he knew what he was about he had played the
first bars of "When First I Met Sweet Peggy", a tune he had played
often, twenty years before, in his courting days, and had never happened
to play since. He sawed it right through (the cold hand left after the
first bar or two) standing up; then still stood with fiddle and bow
trembling in his hands, with the queer feeling still on him, and a
rush of old thoughts going through his head, all of which he set down
afterwards to the effect of the heat. He put the