s were deep-set and black, with occasional peculiar golden flashes in
them. A strange looking man was old Abel Blair; and as strange was he as
he looked. Lower Carmody people would have told you.

Old Abel was almost always sober in these, his later years. He was sober
to-day. He liked to bask in that ripe sunlight as well as his dog and
cat did; and in such baskings he almost always looked out of his doorway
at the far, fine blue sky over the tops of the crowding maples. But
to-day he was not looking at the sky, instead, he was staring at the
black, dusty rafters of his kitchen, where hung dried meats and strings
of onions and bunches of herbs and fishing tackle and guns and skins.

But old Abel saw not these things; his face was the face of a man who
beholds visions, compact of heavenly pleasure and hellish pain, for old
Abel was seeing what he might have been--and what he was; as he always
saw when Felix Moore played to him on the violin. And the awful joy of
dreaming that he was young again, with unspoiled life before him, was
so great and compelling that it counterbalanced the agony in the
realization of a dishonoured old age, following years in which he had
squandered the wealth of his soul in ways where Wisdom lifted not her
voice.

Felix Moore was standing opposite to him, before an untidy stove, where
the noon fire had died down into pallid, scattered ashes. Under his chin
he held old Abel's brown, battered fiddle; his eyes, too, were fixed
on the ceiling; and he, too, saw things not lawful to be uttered in any
language save that of music; and of all music, only that given forth by
the anguished, enraptured spirit of the violin. And yet this Felix was
little more than twelve years old, and his face was still the face of a
child who knows nothing of either sorrow or sin or failure or remorse.
Only in his large, gray-black eyes was there something not of the
child--something that spoke of an inheritance from many hearts, now
ashes, which had aforetime grieved and joyed, and struggled and failed,
and succeeded and grovelled. The inarticulate cries of their longings
had passed into this child's soul, and transmuted themselves into the
expression of his music.

Felix was a beautiful child. Carmody people, who stayed at home, thought
so; and old Abel Blair, who had roamed afar in many lands, thought so;
and even the Rev. Stephen Leonard, who taught, and tried to believe,
that favour is deceitful and beauty is vain