y leave. He's left
it behind him--like the squirrel, and the water in the brook."

Suddenly the boy's face changed. It grew rapt and luminous as he leaped
to his feet, crying joyously: "But he asked me to play, so he went
singing--singing just as he said that they did. And I made him walk
through green forests with the ripple of the brooks in his ears!
Listen--like this!" And once more the boy raised the violin to his
chin, and once more the music trilled and rippled about the shocked,
amazed ears of Simeon Holly and his wife.

For a time neither the man nor the woman could speak. There was nothing
in their humdrum, habit-smoothed tilling of the soil and washing of
pots and pans to prepare them for a scene like this--a moonlit barn, a
strange dead man, and that dead man's son babbling of brooks and
squirrels, and playing jigs on a fiddle for a dirge. At last, however,
Simeon found his voice.

"Boy, boy, stop that!" he thundered. "Are you mad--clean mad? Go into
the house, I say!" And the boy, dazed but obedient, put up his violin,
and followed the woman, who, with tear-blinded eyes, was leading the
way down the stairs.

Mrs. Holly was frightened, but she was also strangely moved. From the
long ago the sound of another violin had come to her--a violin, too,
played by a boy's hands. But of this, all this, Mrs. Holly did not like
to think.

In the kitchen now she turned and faced her young guest.

"Are you hungry, little boy?"

David hesitated; he had not forgotten the woman, the milk, and the
gold-piece.

"Are you hungry--dear?" stammered Mrs. Holly again; and this time
David's clamorous stomach forced a "yes" from his unwilling lips; which
sent Mrs. Holly at once into the pantry for bread and milk and a
heaped-up plate of doughnuts such as David had never seen before.

Like any hungry boy David ate his supper; and Mrs. Holly, in the face
of this very ordinary sight of hunger being appeased at her table,
breathed more freely, and ventured to think that perhaps this strange
little boy was not so very strange, after all.

"What is your name?" she found courage to ask then.

"David."

"David what?"

"Just David."

"But your father's name?" Mrs. Holly had almost asked, but stopped in
time. She did not want to speak of him. "Where do you live?" she asked
instead.

"On the mountain, 'way up, up on the mountain where I can see my Silver
Lake every day, you know."

"But you didn't live there alone?"

"Oh