his own. His rage, his love, and his malignant hate, his tenderness
and his lust should fill the barber's shop with a flood which would
drown the Gorgio raider. He laughed to himself, almost unconsciously.
Then suddenly he leaned his cheek to the instrument and drew the bow
across the strings with a savage softness. The old cottonfield fiddle
cried out with a thrilling, exquisite pain, but muffled, as a hand at
the lips turns agony into a tender moan. Some one--some spirit--in the
fiddle was calling for its own.

Five minutes later-a five minutes in which people gathered at the
door of the shop, and heads were thrust inside in ravished wonder--the
palpitating Romany lowered the fiddle from his chin, and stood for a
minute looking into space, as though he saw a vision.

He was roused by old Berry's voice. "Das a fiddle I wouldn't sell for
a t'ousand dollars. If I could play like dat I wouldn't sell it for ten
t'ousand. You kin play a fiddle to make it worth a lot--you."

The Romany handed back the instrument. "It's got something inside it
that makes it better than it is. It's not a good fiddle, but it has
something--ah, man alive, it has something!" It was as though he was
talking to himself.

Berry made a quick, eager gesture. "It's got the cotton-fields and the
slave days in it. It's got the whip and the stocks in it; it's got the
cry of the old man that'd never see his children ag'in. That's what the
fiddle's got in it."

Suddenly, in an apparent outburst of anger, he swept down on the front
door and drove the gathering crowd away.

"Dis is a barber-shop," he said with an angry wave of his hand; "it
ain't a circuse."

One man protested. "I want a shave," he said. He tried to come inside,
but was driven back.

"I ain't got a razor that'd cut the bristle off your face," the old
barber declared peremptorily; "and, if I had, it wouldn't be busy on
you. I got two customers, and that's all I'm going to take befo' I have
my dinner. So you git away. There ain't goin' to be no more music."

The crowd drew off, for none of them cared to offend this autocrat of
the shears and razor.

Ingolby had listened to the music with a sense of being swayed by a wind
which blew from all quarters of the compass at once. He loved music; it
acted as a clearing-house to his mind; and he played the piano himself
with the enthusiasm of a wilful amateur, who took liberties with every
piece he essayed. There was something in this fellow