ttering at his wife. He was tipsy, most likely, but that had never yet
interfered with the safety of his fiddle: Robert heard its faint echo
as he laid it gently down. Nor was he too tipsy to lock the door behind
him, leaving Robert incarcerated amongst the old boots and leather and
rosin.

For one moment only did the boy's heart fail him. The next he was in
action, for a happy thought had already struck him. Hastily, that he
might forestall sleep in the brain of the soutar, he undid his parcel,
and after carefully enveloping his own violin in the paper, took the old
wife of the soutar, and proceeded to perform upon her a trick which in
a merry moment his master had taught him, and which, not without some
feeling of irreverence, he had occasionally practised upon his own bonny
lady.

The shoemaker's room was overhead; its thin floor of planks was the
ceiling of the workshop. Ere Dooble Sanny was well laid by the side of
his sleeping wife, he heard a frightful sound from below, as of some one
tearing his beloved violin to pieces. No sound of rending coffin-planks
or rising dead would have been so horrible in the ears of the soutar.
He sprang from his bed with a haste that shook the crazy tenement to its
foundation.

The moment Robert heard that, he put the violin in its place, and took
his station by the door-cheek. The soutar came tumbling down the stair,
and rushed at the door, but found that he had to go back for the key.
When, with uncertain hand, he had opened at length, he went straight to
the nest of his treasure, and Robert slipping out noiselessly, was in
the next street before Dooble Sanny, having found the fiddle uninjured,
and not discovering the substitution, had finished concluding that the
whisky and his imagination had played him a very discourteous trick
between them, and retired once more to bed. And not till Robert had cut
his foot badly with a piece of glass, did he discover that he had left
his shoes behind him. He tied it up with his handkerchief, and limped
home the three miles, too happy to think of consequences.

Before he had gone far, the moon floated up on the horizon, large, and
shaped like the broadside of a barrel. She stared at him in amazement to
see him out at such a time of the night. But he grasped his violin and
went on. He had no fear now, even when he passed again over the desolate
moss, although he saw the stagnant pools glimmering about him in the
moonlight. And ever after thi