f nature's minstrel? Who will make me an offer for this vestal
virgin of song--the joy of the morning and the benediction of the
evening? What do I hear? The best of the wine to the last of the feast!
What do I hear?--five dollars--seven dollars--nine dollars--going at
nine dollars--ten dollars--Well, ladies and gentlemen, the bird can
sing--ah, voila!"

He stopped short for a moment, for as the evening sun swept its veil
of rainbow radiance over the scene, the bird began to sing. Its little
throat swelled, it chirruped, it trilled, it called, it soared, it lost
itself in a flood of ecstasy. In the applausive silence, the emotional
recess of the sale, as it were, the man to whom the bird and the song
meant most, pushed his way up to the stand where M. Manotel stood. When
the people saw who it was, they fell back, for there was that in his
face which needed no interpretation. It filled them with a kind of awe.

He reached up a brown, eager, affectionate hand--it had always been
that--fat and small, but rather fine and certainly emotional, though not
material or sensual.

"Go on with your bidding," he said.

He was going to buy the thing which had belonged to his daughter, was
beloved by her--the living oracle of the morning, the muezzin of his
mosque of home. It had been to the girl who had gone as another such a
bird had been to the mother of the girl, the voice that sang, "Praise
God," in the short summer of that bygone happiness of his. Even this
cage and its homebird were not his; they belonged to the creditors.

"Go on. I buy--I bid," Jean Jacques said in a voice that rang. It had
no blur of emotion. It had resonance. The hammer that struck the bell of
his voice was the hammer of memory, and if it was plaintive it also was
clear, and it was also vibrant with the silver of lost hopes.

M. Manotel humoured him, while the bird still sang. "Four dollars--five
dollars: do I hear no more than five dollars?--going once, going twice,
going three times--gone!" he cried, for no one had made a further bid;
and indeed M. Manotel would not have heard another voice than Jean
Jacques' if it had been as loud as the falls of the Saguenay. He was a
kind of poet in his way, was M. Manotel. He had been married four times,
and he would be married again if he had the chance; also he wrote verses
for tombstones in the churchyard at St. Saviour's, and couplets for
fetes and weddings.

He handed the cage to Jean Jacques, who put it d