“I never took so much comfort in all my days. Jot got one of the Billings girls to come over and help in the housework, so ‘t I could lay easy ‘s long as I wanted to; and I never had such a rest before nor since. There ain’t any heaven in the book o’ Revelations that ‘s any better than them two weeks was. I used to lay quiet in my good feather bed, fingering the pattern of my best crochet quilt, and looking at the fire-light shining on Lovey and the baby. She ‘d hardly leave him in the cradle a minute. When I did n’t want him in bed with me, she ‘d have him in her lap. Babies are common enough to most folks, but Lovey was diff’rent. She ‘d never had any experience with children, either, for we was the youngest in our family; and it wa’n’t long before we come near being the oldest, too, for mother buried seven of us before she went herself. Anyway, I never saw nobody else look as she done when she held my baby. I don’t mean nothing blasphemious when I say ‘t was for all the world like your photograph of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
“The nights come in early, so it was ‘most dark at four o’clock. The little chamber was so peaceful! I could hear Jot rattling the milk-pails, but I’d draw a deep breath o’ comfort, for I knew the milk would be strained and set away without my stepping foot to the floor. Lovey used to set by the fire, with a tall candle on the light-stand behind her, and a little white knit cape over her shoulders. She had the pinkest cheeks, and the longest eyelashes, and a mouth like a little red buttonhole; and when she bent over the baby, and sung to him,—though his ears wa’n’t open, I guess for his eyes wa’n’t,—the tears o’ joy used to rain down my cheeks. It was pennyrial hymns she used to sing mostly, and the one I remember best was
“‘Daniel’s wisdom may I know,
Stephen’s faith and spirit show;
John’s divine communion feel,
Moses’ meekness, Joshua’s zeal,
Run like the unwearied Paul,
Win the day and conquer all.
“‘Mary’s love may I possess,
Lydia’s tender-heartedness,
Peter’s fervent spirit feel,
James’s faith by works reveal,
Like young Timothy may I
Every sinful passion fly.’
“‘Oh Diademy,’ she ‘d say, ‘you was always the best, and it ‘s nothing more ‘n right the baby should have come to you. P’r’aps God will think I’m good enough some time; and if he does, Diademy, I’ll offer up a sacrifice every morning and every evening. But I’m afraid,’ says she, ‘he thinks I can’t stand any more happiness, and be a faithful follower of the cross. The Bible says we ‘ve got to wade through fiery floods before we can enter the kingdom. I don’t hardly know how Reuben and I are going to find any way to wade through; we’re both so happy, they ‘d have to be consid’able hot before we took notice,’ says she, with the dimples all breaking out in her cheeks.
“And that was true as gospel. She thought everything Reuben done was just right, and he thought everything she done was just right. There wa’n’t nobody else; the world was all Reuben ‘n’ all Lovey to them. If you could have seen her when she was looking for him to come from Skowhegan! She used to watch at the attic window; and when she seen him at the foot of the hill she ‘d up like a squirrel, and run down the road without stopping for anything but to throw a shawl over her head. And Reuben would ketch her up as if she was a child, and scold her for not putting a hat on, and take her under his coat coming up the hill. They was a sight for the neighbors, I must confess, but it wa’n’t one you could hardly disapprove of, neither. Aunt Hitty said it was tempting Providence and couldn’t last, and God would visit his wrath on ‘em for making idols of sinful human flesh.
“She was right one way,—it didn’t last; but nobody can tell me God was punishing of ‘em for being too happy. I guess he ‘ain’t got no objection to folks being happy here below, if they don’t forget it ain’t the whole story.
“Well, I must mark in a bud on Lovey’s stalk now, and I’m going to make it of her baby’s long white cloak. I earned the money for it myself, making coats, and put four yards of the finest cashmere into it; for three years after little Jot was born I went over to Skowhegan to help Lovey through her time o’ trial. Time o’ trial! I thought I was happy, but I didn’t know how to be as happy as Lovey did; I wa’n’t made on that pattern.
“When I first showed her the baby (it was a boy, same as mine), her eyes shone like two evening stars. She held up her weak arms, and gathered the little bundle o’ warm flannen into ‘em; and when she got it close she shut her eyes and moved her lips, and I knew she was taking her lamb to the altar and offering it up as a sacrifice. Then Reuben come in. I seen him give one look at the two dark heads laying close together on the white piller, and then go down on his knees by the side of the bed. ‘T wa’n’t no place for me; I went off, and left ‘em together. We didn’t mistrust it then, but they only had three days more of happiness, and I’m glad I give ‘em every minute.”
The room grew dusky as twilight stole gently over the hills of Pleasant River. Priscilla’s lip trembled; Diadema’s tears fell thick and fast on the white rosebud, and she had to keep wiping her eyes as she followed the pattern.
“I ain’t said as much as this about it for five years,” she went on, with a tell-tale quiver in her voice, “but now I’ve got going I can’t stop. I’ll have to get the weight out o’ my heart somehow.
“Three days after I put Lovey’s baby into her arms the Lord called her home. ‘When I prayed so hard for this little new life, Reuben,’ says she holding the baby as if she could never let it go, ‘I didn’t think I’d got to give up my own in place of it; but it’s the first fiery flood we’ve had, dear, and though it burns to my feet I’ll tread it as brave as I know how.’
“She didn’t speak a word after that; she just faded away like a snowdrop, hour by hour. And Reuben and I stared at one another in the face as if we was dead instead of her, and we went about that house o’ mourning like sleep-walkers for days and says, not knowing whether we et or slept, or what we done.
“As for the baby, the poor little mite didn’t live many hours after its mother, and we buried ‘em together. Reuben and I knew what Lovey would have liked. She gave her life for the baby’s, and it was a useless sacrifice, after all. No, it wa’n’t neither; it couldn’t have been! You needn’t tell me God’ll let such sacrifices as that come out useless! But anyhow, we had one coffin for ‘em both, and I opened Lovey’s arms and laid the baby in ‘em. When Reuben and I took our last look, we thought she seemed more ‘n ever like Mary, the mother of Jesus. There never was another like her, and there never will be. ‘Nonesuch,’ Reuben used to call her.”
There was silence in the room, broken only by the ticking of the old clock and the tinkle of a distant cowbell. Priscilla made an impetuous movement, flung herself down by the basket of rags, and buried her head in Diadema’s gingham apron.
“Dear Mrs. Bascom, don’t cry. I’m sorry, as the children say.”
“No, I won’t more ‘n a minute. Jot can’t stand it to see me give way. You go and touch a match to the kitchen fire, so ‘t the kettle will be boiling, and I’ll have a minute to myself. I don’t know what the neighbors would think to ketch me crying over my drawing-in frame; but the spell’s over now, or ‘bout over, and when I can muster up courage I’ll take the rest of the baby’s cloak and put a border of white everlastings round the outside of the rug. I’ll always mean the baby’s birth and Lovey’s death to me; but the flowers will remind me it ‘s life everlasting for both of ‘em, and so it’s the most comforting end I can think of.”
It was indeed a beautiful rug when it was finished and laid in front of the sofa in the fore-room. Diadema was very choice of it. When company was expected she removed it from its accustomed place, and spread it in a corner of the room where no profane foot could possibly tread on it. Unexpected callers were managed by a different method. If they seated themselves on the sofa, she would fear they did not “set easy” or “rest comfortable” there, and suggest their moving to the stuffed chair by the window. The neighbors thought this solicitude merely another sign of Diadema’s “p’ison neatness,” excusable in this case as there was so much white in the new rug.
The fore-room blinds were ordinarily closed, and the chillness of death pervaded the sacred apartment; but on great occasions, when the sun was allowed to penetrate the thirty-two tiny panes of glass in each window, and a blaze was lighted in the fire-place, Miss Hollis would look in as she went upstairs, and muse a moment over the pathetic little romance of rags, the story of two lives worked into a bouquet of old-fashioned posies, whose gay tints were brought out by a setting of sombre threads. Existence had gone so quietly in this remote corner of the world that all its important events, babyhood, childhood, betrothal, marriage, motherhood, with all their mysteries of love and life and death, were chronicled in this narrow space not two yards square.
Diadema came in behind the little school-teacher one afternoon.
“I cal’late,” she said, “that being kep’ in a dark room, and never being tread on, it will last longer ‘n I do. If it does, Priscilla, you know that white crepe shawl of mine I wear to meeting hot Sundays: that would make a second row of everlastings round the border. You could piece out the linings good and smooth on the under side, draw in the white flowers, and fill ‘em round with black to set ‘em off. The rug would be han’somer than ever then, and the story—would be finished.”
A VILLAGE STRADIVARIUS
I
“Goodfellow, Puck and goblins,
Know more than any book.
Down with your doleful problems,
And court the sunny brook.
The south-winds are quick-witted,
The schools are sad and slow,
The masters quite omitted
The lore we care to know.”
Emerson’s April.
“Find the 317th page, Davy, and begin at the top of the right-hand column.”
The boy turned the leaves of the old instruction book obediently, and then began to read in a sing-song, monotonous tone:—
“‘One of Pag-pag’”—
“Pag-a-ni-ni’s.”
“‘One of Paggernyner’s’ (I wish all the fellers in your stories didn’t have such tough old names!) ‘most dis-as-ter-ous triumphs he had when playing at Lord Holland’s.’ (Who was Lord Holland, uncle Tony?) ‘Some one asked him to im-pro-vise on the violin the story of a son who kills his father, runs a-way, becomes a highway-man, falls in love with a girl who will not listen to him; so he leads her to a wild country site, suddenly jumping with her from a rock into an a-b-y-double-s’”—
“Abyss.”
“‘—a—rock—into—an—abyss, were they disappear forever. Paggernyner listened quietly, and when the story was at an end he asked that all the lights should be distinguished.’”
“Look closer, Davy.”
“‘Should be extinguished. He then began playing, and so terrible was the musical in-ter-pre-ta-tion of the idea which had been given him that several of the ladies fainted, and the sal-salon-salon, when relighted, looked like a battle-field.’ Cracky! Wouldn’t you like to have been there, uncle Tony? But I don’t believe anybody ever played that way, do you?”
“Yes,” said the listener, dreamily raising his sightless eyes to the elm-tree that grew by the kitchen door. “I believe it, and I can hear it myself when you read the story to me. I feel that the secret of everything in the world that is beautiful, or true, or terrible, is hidden in the strings of my violin, Davy, but only a master can draw it from captivity.”
“You make stories on your violin, too, uncle Tony, even if the ladies don’t faint away in heaps, and if the kitchen doesn’t look like a battle-field when you ‘ve finished. I’m glad it doesn’t, for my part, for I should have more housework to do than ever.”
“Poor Davy! you couldn’t hate housework any worse if you were a woman; but it is all done for to-day. Now paint me one of your pictures, laddie; make me see with your eyes.”
The boy put down the book and leaped out of the open door, barely touching the old millstone that served for a step. Taking a stand in the well-worn path, he rested his hands on his hips, swept the landscape with the glance of an eagle, and began like a young improvisator:—
“The sun is just dropping behind Brigadier Hill.”
“What color is it?”
“Red as fire, and there isn’t anything near it,—it ‘s almost alone in the sky; there ‘s only teenty little white feather clouds here and there. The bridge looks as if it was a silver string tying the two sides of the river together. The water is pink where the sun shines into it. All the leaves of the trees are kind of swimming in the red light,—I tell you, nunky, just as if I was looking through red glass. The weather vane on Squire Bean’s barn dazzles so the rooster seems to be shooting gold arrows into the river. I can see the tip top of Mount Washington where the peak of its snow-cap touches the pink sky. The hen-house door is open. The chickens are all on their roost, with their heads cuddled under their wings.”
“Did you feed them?”
The boy clapped his hand over his mouth with a comical gesture of penitence, and dashed into the shed for a panful of corn, which he scattered over the ground, enticing the sleepy fowls by insinuating calls of “Chick, chick, chick, chick! Come, biddy, biddy, biddy, biddy! Come, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick!”
The man in the doorway smiled as over the misdemeanor of somebody very dear and lovable, and rising from his chair felt his way to a corner shelf, took down a box, and drew from it a violin swathed in a silk bag. He removed the covering with reverential hands. The tenderness of the face was like that of a young mother dressing or undressing her child. As he fingered the instrument his hands seemed to have become all eyes. They wandered caressingly over the polished surface as if enamored of the perfect thing that they had created, lingering here and there with rapturous tenderness on some special beauty,—the graceful arch of the neck, the melting curves of the cheeks, the delicious swell of the breasts.
When he had satisfied himself for the moment, he took the bow, and lifting the violin under his chin, inclined his head fondly toward it and began to play.
The tune at first seemed muffled, but had a curious bite, that began in distant echoes, but after a few minutes’ the playing grew firmer and clearer, ringing out at last with velvety richness and strength until the atmosphere was satiated with harmony. No more ethereal note ever flew out of a bird’s throat than Anthony Croft set free from this violin, his liebling, his “swan song,” made in the year he had lost his eyesight.
Anthony Croft had been the only son of his mother, and she a widow. His boyhood had been exactly like that of all the other boys in Edgewood, save that he hated school a trifle more, if possible, than any of the others; though there was a unanimity of aversion in this matter that surprised and wounded teachers and parents.
The school was the ordinary “deestrick” school of that time; there were not enough scholars for what Cyse Higgins called a “degraded” school. The difference between Anthony and the other boys lay in the reason as well as the degree of his abhorrence.
He had come into the world a naked, starving human soul; he longed to clothe himself, and he was hungry and ever hungrier for knowledge; but never within the four walls of the village schoolhouse could he get hold of one fact that would yield him its secret sense, one glimpse of clear light that would shine in upon the “darkness which may be felt” in his mind, one thought or word that would feed his soul.
The only place where his longings were ever stilled, where he seemed at peace with himself, where he understood what he was made for, was out of doors in the woods. When he should have been poring over the sweet, palpitating mysteries of the multiplication table, his vagrant gaze was always on the open window near which he sat. He could never study when a fly buzzed on the window-pane; he was always standing on the toes of his bare feet, trying to locate and understand the buzz that puzzled him. The book was a mute, soulless thing that had no relation to his inner world of thought and feeling. He turned ever from the dead seven-times-six to the mystery of life about him.
He was never a special favorite with his teachers; that was scarcely to be expected. In his very early years, his pockets were gone through with every morning when he entered the school door, and the contents, when confiscated, would comprise a jew’s-harp, a bit of catgut, screws whittled out of wood, tacks, spools, pins, and the like. But when robbed of all these he could generally secrete a piece of elastic, which, when put between his teeth and stretched to its utmost capacity, would yield a delightful twang when played upon with the forefinger. He could also fashion an interesting musical instrument in his desk by means of spools and catgut and bits of broken glass. The chief joy of his life was an old tuning-fork that the teacher of the singing school had given him, but, owing to the degrading and arbitrary censorship of pockets that prevailed, he never dared bring it into the schoolroom. There were ways, however, of evading inexorable law and circumventing base injustice. He hid the precious thing under a thistle just outside the window. The teacher had sometimes a brief season of apathy on hot afternoons, when she was hearing the primer class read, “I see a pig. The pig is big. The big pig can dig;” which stirring in phrases were always punctuated by the snores of the Hanks baby, who kept sinking down on his fat little legs in the line and giving way to slumber during the lesson. At such a moment Anthony slipped out of the window and snapped the tuning-fork several times,—just enough to save his soul from death,—and then slipped in again. He was caught occasionally, but not often; and even when he was, there were mitigating circumstances, for he was generally put under the teacher’s desk for punishment. It was a dark, close, sultry spot, but when he was well seated, and had grown tied of looking at the triangle of elastic in the teacher’s congress boot, and tired of wishing it was his instead of hers, he would tie one end of a bit of thread to the button of his gingham shirt, and, carrying it round his left ear several times, make believe he was Paganini languishing in prison and playing on a violin with a single string.
As he grew older there was no marked improvement, and Tony Croft was by general assent counted the laziest boy in the village. That he was lazy in certain matters merely because he was in a frenzy of industry to pursue certain others had nothing to do with the case, of course.
If any one had ever given him a task in which he could have seen cause working to effect, in which he could have found by personal experiment a single fact that belonged to him, his own by divine right of discovery, he would have counted labor or study all joy.
He was one incarnate Why and How, one brooding wonder and interrogation point. “Why does the sun drive away the stars? Why do the leaves turn red and gold? What makes the seed swell in the earth? From whence comes the life hidden in the egg under the bird’s breast? What holds the moon in the sky? Who regulates her shining? Who moves the wind? Who made me, and what am I? Who, why, how whither? If I came from God but only lately, teach me his lessons first, put me into vital relation with life and law, and then give me your dead signs and equivalents for real things, that I may learn more and more, and ever more and ever more.”
There was no spirit in Edgewood bold enough to conceive that Tony learned anything in the woods, but as there was never sufficient school money to keep the village seat of learning open more than half the year the boy educated himself at the fountain head of wisdom, and knowledge of the other half. His mother, who owned him for a duckling hatched from a hen’s egg, and was never quite sure he would not turn out a black sheep and a crooked stick to boot, was obliged to confess that Tony had more useless information than any boy in the village. He knew just where to find the first Mayflowers, and would bring home the waxen beauties when other people had scarcely begun to think about the spring. He could tell where to look for the rare fringed gentian, the yellow violet, the Indian pipe. There were clefts in the rocks of the Indian Cellar where, when every one else failed, he could find harebells and columbines.
When his tasks were done, and the other boys were amusing themselves each in his own way, you would find Tony lying flat on the pine needles in the woods, listening to the notes of the wild birds, and imitating them patiently, til you could scarcely tell which was boy and which was bird; and if you could, the birds couldn’t, for many a time he coaxed the bobolinks and thrushes to perch on the low boughs above his head and chirp to him as if he were a feathered brother. There was nothing about the building of nests with which he was not familiar. He could have taken hold and helped if the birds had not been so shy, and if he had had beak and claw instead of clumsy fingers. He would sit near a beehive for hours without moving, or lie prone in the sandy road, under the full glare of the sun, watching the ants acting out their human comedy; sometimes surrounding a favorite hill with stones, that the comedy might not be turned into a tragedy by a careless footfall. The cottage on the river road grew more and more to resemble a museum and herbarium as the years went by, and the Widow Croft’s weekly house-cleaning was a matter that called for the exercise of Christian grace.
Still, Tony was a good son, affectionate, considerate, and obedient. His mother had no idea that he would ever be able, or indeed willing, to make a living; but there was a forest of young timber growing up, a small hay farm to depend upon, and a little hoard that would keep him out of the poorhouse when she died and left him to his own devices. It never occurred to her that he was in any way remarkable. If he were difficult to understand, it reflected more upon his eccentricity than upon her density. What was a woman to do with a boy of twelve who, when she urged him to drop the old guitar he was taking apart and hurry off to school, cried, “Oh, mother! when there is so much to learn in this world, it is wicked, wicked to waste time in school.”
About this period Tony spent hours in the attic arranging bottles and tumblers into a musical scale. He also invented an instrument made of small and great, long and short pins, driven into soft board to different depths, and when the widow passed his door on the way to bed she invariable saw this barbaric thing locked up to the boy’s breast, for he often played himself to sleep with it.
At fifteen he had taken to pieces and put together again, strengthened, soldered, tinkered, mended, and braced every accordion, guitar, melodeon, dulcimer, and fiddle in Edgewood, Pleasant River, and the neighboring villages. There was a little money to be earned in this way, but very little, as people in general regarded this “tinkering” as a pleasing diversion in which they could indulge him without danger. As an example of this attitude, Dr. Berry’s wife’s melodeon had lost two stops, the pedals had severed connection with the rest of the works, it wheezed like an asthmatic, and two black keys were missing. Anthony worked more than a week on its rehabilitation, and received in return Mrs. Berry’s promise that the doctor would pull a tooth for him some time! This, of course, was a guerdon for the future, but it seemed pathetically distant to the lad who had never had a toothache in his life. He had to plead with Cyse Higgins for a week before that prudent young farmer would allow him to touch his five-dollar fiddle. He obtained permission at last only because by offering to give Cyse his calf in case he spoiled the violin. “That seems square,” said Cyse doubtfully, “but after all, you can’t play on a calf!” “Neither will your fiddle give milk, if you keep it long enough,” retorted Tony; and this argument was convincing.
So great was his confidence in Tony’s skill that Squire Bean trusted his father’s violin to him, one that had been bought in Berlin seventy years before. It had been hanging on the attic wall for a half century, so that the back was split in twain, the sound-post lost, the neck and the tailpiece cracked. The lad took it home, and studied it for two whole evenings before the open fire. The problem of restoring it was quite beyond his abilities. He finally took the savings of two summers’ “blueberry money” and walked sixteen miles to Portland, where he bought a book called The Practical Violinist. The Supplement proved to be a mine of wealth. Even the headings appealed to his imagination and intoxicated him with their suggestions,—On Scraping, Splitting, and Repairing Violins, Violin Players, Great Violinists, Solo Playing, etc.; and at the very end a Treatise on the Construction, Preservation, Repair, and Improvement of the Violin, by Jacob Augustus Friedheim, Instrument Maker to the Court of the Archduke of Weimar.
There was a good deal of moral advice in the preface that sadly puzzled the boy, who was always in a condition of chronic amazement at the village disapprobation of his favorite fiddle. That the violin did not in some way receive the confidence enjoyed by other musical instruments, he perceived from various paragraphs written by the worthy author of The Practical Violinist, as for example:—
“Some very excellent Christian people hold a strong prejudice against the violin because they have always known it associated with dancing and dissipation. Let it be understood that your violin is ‘converted,’ and such an obligation will no longer lie against it. … Many delightful hours may be enjoyed by a young man, if he has obtained a respectable knowledge of his instrument, who otherwise would find the time hang heavy on his hands; or, for want of some better amusement, would frequent the dangerous and destructive paths of vice and be ruined forever. … I am in hopes, therefore, my dear young pupil, that your violin will occupy your attention at just those very times when, if you were immoral or dissipated, you would be at the grogshop, gaming-table, or among vicious females. Such a use of the violin, notwithstanding the prejudices many hold against it, must contribute to virtue, and furnish abundance of innocent and entirely unobjectionable amusement. These are the views with which I hope you have adopted it, and will continue to cherish and cultivate it.”
II
“There is no bard in all the choir,
.......
Not one of all can put in verse,
Or to this presence could rehearse
The sights and voices ravishing
The boy knew on the hills in spring,
When pacing through the oaks he heard
Sharp queries of the sentry-bird,
The heavy grouse’s sudden whir,
The rattle of the kingfisher.”
Emerson’s Harp.
Now began an era of infinite happiness, of days that were never long enough, of evenings when bedtime came all too soon. Oh that there had been some good angel who would have taken in hand Anthony Croft the boy, and, training the powers that pointed so unmistakably in certain directions, given to the world the genius of Anthony Croft, potential instrument maker to the court of St. Cecilia; for it was not only that he had the fingers of a wizard; his ear caught the faintest breath of harmony or hint of discord, as
“Fairy folk a-listening
Hear the seed sprout in the spring,
And for music to their dance
Hear the hedge-rows wake from trance;
Sap that trembles into buds
Sending little rhythmic floods
Of fairy sound in fairy ears.
Thus all beauty that appears
Has birth as sound to finer sense
And lighter-clad intelligence.”
As the universe is all mechanism to one man, all form and color to another, so to Anthony Croft the world was all melody. Notwithstanding all these gifts and possibilities, the doctor’s wife advised the Widow Croft to make a plumber of him, intimating delicately that these freaks of nature, while playing no apparent part in the divine economy, could sometimes be made self-supporting.
The seventeenth year of his life marked a definite epoch in his development. He studied Jacob Friedheim’s treatise until he knew the characteristics of all the great violin models, from the Amatis, Hieronymus, Antonius, and Nicolas, to those of Stradivarius, Guarnerius, and Steiner.
It was in this year, also, that he made a very precious discovery. While browsing in the rubbish in Squire Bean’s garret to see if he could find the missing sound-post of the old violin, he came upon a billet of wood wrapped in cloth and paper. When unwrapped, it was plainly labeled “Wood from the Bean Maple at Pleasant Point; the biggest maple in York County, and believed to be one of the biggest in the State of Maine.” Anthony found that the oldest inhabitant of Pleasant River remembered the stump of the tree, and that the boys used to jump over it and admire its proportions whenever they went fishing at the Point. The wood, therefore, was perhaps eighty or ninety years old. The squire agreed willingly that it should be used to mend the old violin, and told Tony he should have what was left for himself. When, by careful calculation, he found that the remainder would make a whole violin, he laid it reverently away for another twenty years, so that he should be sure it had completed its century of patient waiting for service, and falling on his knees by his bedside said, “I thank Thee, Heavenly Father, for this precious gift, and I promise from this moment to gather the most beautiful wood I can find, and lay it by where it can be used some time to make perfect violins, so that if any creature as poor and helpless as I am needs the wherewithal to do good work, I shall have helped him as Thou hast helped me.” And according to his promise so he did, and the pieces of richly curled maple, of sycamore, and of spruce began to accumulate. They were cut from the sunny side of the trees, in just the right season of the year, split so as to have a full inch thickness towards the bark, and a quarter inch towards the heart. They were then laid for weeks under one of the falls in Wine Brook, where the musical tinkle, tinkle of the stream fell on the wood already wrought upon by years of sunshine and choruses of singing birds.