t I'm afraid I can't be a minister."

"Not a pulpit minister. There's different kinds of ministers, and each
must talk to men in his own tongue if he's going to do 'em any real
good," said old Abel meditatively. "YOUR tongue is music. Strange that
your grandfather can't see that for himself, and him such a broad-minded
man! He's the only minister I ever had much use for. He's God's own if
ever a man was. And he loves you--yes, sir, he loves you like the apple
of his eye."

"And I love him," said Felix warmly. "I love him so much that I'll even
try to be a minister for his sake, though I don't want to be."

"What do you want to be?"

"A great violinist," answered the child, his ivory-hued face suddenly
warming into living rose. "I want to play to thousands--and see their
eyes look as yours do when I play. Sometimes your eyes frighten me, but
oh, it's a splendid fright! If I had father's violin I could do better.
I remember that he once said it had a soul that was doing purgatory for
its sins when it had lived on earth. I don't know what he meant, but it
did seem to me that HIS violin was alive. He taught me to play on it as
soon as I was big enough to hold it."

"Did you love your father?" asked old Abel, with a keen look.

Again Felix crimsoned; but he looked straightly and steadily into his
old friend's face.

"No," he said, "I didn't; but," he added, gravely and deliberately, "I
don't think you should have asked me such a question."

It was old Abel's turn to blush. Carmody people would not have believed
he could blush; and perhaps no living being could have called that
deepening hue into his weather-beaten cheek save only this gray-eyed
child of the rebuking face.

"No, I guess I shouldn't," he said. "But I'm always making mistakes.
I've never made anything else. That's why I'm nothing more than 'Old
Abel' to the Carmody people. Nobody but you and your grandfather ever
calls me 'Mr. Blair.' Yet William Blair at the store up there, rich and
respected as he is, wasn't half as clever a man as I was when we started
in life: you mayn't believe that, but it's true. And the worst of it is,
young Felix, that most of the time I don't care whether I'm Mr. Blair of
old Abel. Only when you play I care. It makes me feel just as a look I
saw in a little girl's eyes some years ago made me feel. Her name was
Anne Shirley and she lived with the Cuthberts down at Avonlea. We got
into a conversation at Blair's store. She coul