d me. I'm his mother and
I know him better nor anybody else, and I know he's different from the
way he seems to you, and even the way he seems to me sometimes. And
I'll tell you how I know that. When I'm asleep I often dream about
him. And when I dream about him, he looks a little the way he does
other times, but he's taller and he's better-looking in the face, and
he looks stronger and brighter and healthier like. And he speaks to
me, and his voice is lower and pleasanter in the sound of it. And
that's the way he'ld be, I know, if he had his health, poor child, and
if everything was right with him. And you'ld all know that and you'ld
feel more for him, if you knew him the way I do."

This was when Terence was six or seven years old. And Ellen often
spoke in this way afterward. She saw Terence in her dreams, and he was
a very different Terence from the one who made her so much trouble
when she was awake, and yet he was partly the same.

And there was one thing that Terence did that almost everybody liked.
I might as well say everybody except Kathleen. He played the fiddle.
Nobody knew how he learned. There was a neighbor of the Sullivans who
came from the same county in Ireland that they did, and he played a
fiddle in an orchestra at a cheap theatre. One day Peter had gone to
see this man and had taken little Terence with him. The fiddle was
lying on the table. The two men went into another room and left
Terence by himself. They were talking busily and they forgot about
him. Then they heard a soft little tune played on the fiddle. "Who's
that playing my fiddle?" said the owner of it.

"Sure," said Peter, "we left nobody there but Terence."

They went quickly back into the room and found Terence hastily laying
the fiddle down where he had found it. "Ah, can't I leave you alone a
minute," said Peter, "but you must be meddling with things that don't
belong to you? What'll I do now if you've gone and hurt the fiddle?"

"Don't be talking that way to the child," said the musician; "sure he
did it no harm. But where at all did he learn to play that way? That's
what I'm thinking. Have you been letting him learn all this time and
never told me?"

"He never learned at all that I know of," Peter answered. "I never saw
him have a fiddle in his hand till this minute."

"It's a strange thing, then," the musician said. "Anybody that can
play a tune like he did that one has a right to play more and better.
Where did you learn i