ying was, I had from the start an absorption
of attention from my audience that Paderewski himself might have envied.
I wound up with a lively trill in the high notes and took my whistle
from my lips with a hearty laugh, for the whole thing had been downright
good fun, the playing itself, the make-believe which went with it, the
surprise and interest in the children's faces, the slow-breaking smile
of the little girl with the dipper.

"I'll warrant you, madam," I said to the woman who now stood frankly
in the doorway with her hands wrapped in her apron, "you haven't heard
those tunes since you were a girl and danced to 'em."

"You're right," she responded heartily.

"I'll give you another jolly one," I said, and, replacing my whistle, I
began with even greater zest to play "Yankee Doodle."

When I had gone through it half a dozen times with such added variations
and trills as I could command, and had two of the children hopping about
in the yard, and the forlorn man tapping his toe to the tune, and a
smile on the face of the forlorn woman, I wound up with a rush and
then, as if I could hold myself in no longer (and I couldn't either!), I
suddenly burst out:

Yankee doodle dandy!
Yankee doodle dandy!
Mind the music and the step,
And with the girls be handy.

It may seem surprising, but I think I can understand why it was--when I
looked up at the woman in the doorway there were tears in her eyes!

"Do you know 'John Brown's Body'?" eagerly inquired the little girl
with the dipper, and then, as if she had done something quite bold and
improper, she blushed and edged toward the doorway.

"How does it go?" I asked, and one of the bold lads in the yard
instantly puckered his lips to show me, and immediately they were all
trying it.

"Here goes," said I, and for the next few minutes, and in my very best
style, I hung Jeff Davis on the sour apple-tree, and I sent the soul
of John Brown marching onward with an altogether unnecessary number of
hallelujahs.

I think sometimes that people--whole families of 'em--literally
perish for want of a good, hearty, whole-souled, mouth-opening,
throat-stretching, side-aching laugh. They begin to think themselves the
abused of creation, they begin to advise with their livers and to hate
their neighbours, and the whole world becomes a miserable dark blue
place quite unfit for human habitation. Well, all this is often only the
result of a neglect to exercise pr