about hungry for a day or two.

I have hurried a little in telling his story in order that I might get
the worst over at once.

Two months before he came to this sad pass he was standing one cold
night in front of the Euston Road entrance to the great terminal
station, when the sound of a violin struck upon his ears, played as
surely a violin was never played in the streets before. The performer,
whoever he might be, slashed away with a wonderful merry abandonment,
playing the jolliest tunes, until he had a great crowd about him, on
the outskirts of which girls with their arms embracing each other swung
round in time to the measured madness of the music. The close-pent crowd
beat time with hand and foot, and sometimes this rude accompaniment
almost drowned the music:--

An Orpheus! An Orpheus! He worked on the crowd; He swayed them with
melody merry and loud.

The people went half wild over this street Paganini. They laughed with
him and danced to his music until their rough acclamation almost made
the music dumb. Then suddenly he changed his theme, and the sparkle
went out of the air and left it dim and foggy as it was by nature, and
by-and-by added a deeper gloom to it. For he played a ghostly and weird
and awful theme, which stilled merriment and chilled jollity, and seemed
to fill the night with phantoms. It made a very singular impression
indeed upon Christopher's! nerves. Christopher was not so well nourished
as he might have been, and when a man's economy plays tricks with his
stomach, the stomach is likely to pass the trick on with interest. He
stood amazed--doubtful of his ears, of the street, of the people, of
his own identity. For that weird and awful theme was his own, and, which
made the thing more wonderful, he had never even written it down. And
here was somebody playing it note for note, a lengthy and intricate
composition which set all theory of coincidence utterly aside. Nobody
need wonder at Christopher's amazement.

The street fiddler played the theme clean out, and then passed through
the crowd in search of coppers. It furnished a lesson worth his learning
that, while he abandoned himself to mirth, the coppers had showered
into the hat at his feet in tinkling accompaniment to his strains; and
that now the weird and mournful theme had sealed generosity's fountain
as with sudden frost. The musician came at last, hat in hand, to
Christopher. He was a queer figure. His hair was long and matted, hi