kly as he had introduced war, he switched to a new subject.

"I want you to try some old Bourbon a man sent me."

He had crossed the room, quick as thought, and pushed a bell; when the
waitress came he told her to bring a tray.

"Isn't whiskey bad for you when you're so nervous?" said Lucy quietly,
and without looking up.

"I don't know," said John, with a certain frolicking quality in his
voice; "I'm trying to find out."

"What was that you were playing a while ago?" I asked. "The slow,
peaceful, sad sort of thing."

"This?" And he whistled a few bars.

I nodded.

"I made it up as I went along," he said; "music's like a language.
When a man's heard a lot of the words and the idioms he can make a
bluff at talking it; but I can only speak a few words. I've only got a
child's vocabulary. I can only say, 'I'm hungry,' or 'I'm sleepy,' or
'I want a set of carpenter's tools,' or 'Brown swiped my tennis bat and
I'm going to punch his head,' or 'The little girl over the fence has
bright blue eyes and throws a ball like a boy and climbs trees.'"

He had to laugh himself at the idea of being able to express such
things in musical terms, but when he had sponged up a long glass of
very darkly mixed Bourbon and Apollinaris, the picture of the little
girl over the fence must have been still in his mind, for having left
us abruptly for the piano, he preluded and then began to improvise upon
that theme. He talked rather than sang, but always in tune and with
the clearest enunciation, and any amount of experience.

He began merrily, and in no time had us both laughing; I think the
first air which he tortured to fit his unrhymed and unrhythmical words
belonged once to Mozart, but I am not sure. It was made out of
merriness, sunshine, and dew.

"The little girl over the fence, the fence
Has bri-i-i-ight blue-ooo eyes
And throws a ball like a boy, a boy,
And cli-i-i-i-i-i-imbs trees."

He repeated in the minor, modulated into a more solemn key, and once
more talked off the words. He left you with a slight feeling of
anxiety. You began to be afraid that the little girl would fall out of
the trees and hurt herself. But no, instead he grabbed something by
the hair right out of a Beethoven adagio, and began to want that little
girl with the blue eyes as a little girl with blue eyes has seldom been
wanted before; she became Psyche, Trojan Helen, a lover's dream; all
that is most exquisite and to be desire