t, my boy?"

"I never learned it at all," Terence answered; "I just saw the fiddle
there and I thought I'ld see could I play it. But it's little I could
be doing with it, I'm thinking."

Peter was surprised enough to find that Terence could play a tune on a
fiddle, and so was Ellen, when she heard about it. But they did not
wonder at it so much as they would have done if they had known more
about such things. They had a sort of notion that one person could
play the fiddle and another could not, much as one person can move his
ears and another cannot. So they thought little about it. But when
Terence begged them to buy him a fiddle of his own, they saved up
money a little at a time, and at last they bought him one.

Then for days Terence did nothing but play. He played simple little
tunes at first, but soon he began to play harder ones. Then he got
impatient with himself, as it seemed, and he began to play such music
as nobody who heard him had ever heard before. Often he would not play
when he was asked, but he would play for hours by himself, when he
thought that no one was listening. His father brought his friend the
musician to hear him, and he said that it was wonderful. He had never
heard the fiddle played so well. Nobody had ever heard the fiddle
played so well.

And Kathleen never cared to hear Terence play. She did hear him play,
many times, of course, and she listened politely, but she told her
grandmother that she did not care about it at all. She would much
rather hear the poor fiddler of the little orchestra, who had come
from their county in Ireland. Their neighbor the fiddler himself was
as much shocked as anyone to hear Kathleen talk like this. "Did you
ever hear anybody play the fiddle like Terence plays it?" he asked
her, when she said something of the sort to him.

"No," Kathleen answered. "I never heard anybody play it like Terence,
but I have heard some play it better than Terence. You play it
better."

"Oh, child," he said, "I'ld give all the money I'll be earning in the
next ten years if I could play like he does. Don't you see I can't do
half the things he does with it?"

"I know that," Kathleen said; "it isn't the way he plays a bit that
makes everybody talk so about him; it's just the things he does. When
he plays a tune it just doesn't mean anything, and when you play a
tune it does."

And that was as near as Kathleen could ever come to telling why she
did not care about Terence's pl