wn the valleys and wrap the meadows
in twilight. Farther and farther the notes recede as the flutesman
gathers his quiet flock along the winding paths. Smooth and far in the
tranquil evening-air fall the receding notes, a clear, silvery
sweetness; farther and farther in the hushed evening air, lessening and
lowering, as you bend to listen, till the vanishing strain just
cleaves, a single thread of pearl-pure melody, finer, finer, finer,
through the dewy twilight, and--you hear only your own heart-beats. It
is not dead, but risen. It never ceased. It knew no pause. It has
gone up the heights to mingle with the songs of the angels. You rouse
yourself with a start, and gaze at your neighbor half bewildered. What
is it? Where are we? Oh, my remorseful heart! There is no shepherd,
no mountain, no girl with scarlet ribbon and black braids bound on her
beautiful temples. It was only a fiddle on a platform!

Now you need not tell me that. I know better. I have lived among
fiddles all my life,--embryotic, Silurian fiddles, splintered from
cornstalks, that blessed me in the golden afternoons of green summers
waving in the sunshine of long ago,--sympathetic fiddles that did me
yeomen's service once, when I fell off a bag of corn up garret and
broke my head, and the frightened fiddles, not knowing what else to do,
came and fiddled to me lying on the settee, with such boundless,
extravagant flourish that nobody heard the doctor's gig rolling by, and
so sinciput and occiput were left overnight to compose their own
quarrels, whereby I was naturally all right before the doctor had a
chance at me, suffering only the slight disadvantage of going
broken-headed through life. What I might have been with a whole skull,
I don't know; but I will say, that, good or bad, and even in fragments,
my head is the best part of me.

Yes, I think I may dare affirm that whatever there is to know about a
fiddle I know, and I can give my affidavit that it is no fiddle that
takes you up on its broad wings, outstripping the "wondrous horse of
brass," which required

"the space of a day natural,
This is to sayn, four and twenty houres,
Wher so you list, in drought or elles showres,
To beren your body into every place
To which your herte willeth for to pace,
Withouten wemme of you, thurgh foule or faire,"

since it bears you, "withouten" even so much as your "herte's" will, in
a moment's time, over the and above the stars.