with invisible
hands, the music of the first years of the world, became a truth, though
a truth that none could prove. And by-and-by, no man ever travelled the
valley without taking off his hat as he passed the Golden Pipes--so had
a cripple with his whimsies worked upon the land.

Then, too, perhaps his music had to do with it. As a child he had only a
poor concertina, but by it he drew the traveller and the mountaineer
and the worker in the valley to him like a magnet. Some touch of the
mysterious, some sweet fantastical melody in all he played, charmed
them, even when he gave them old familiar airs. From the concertina he
passed to the violin, and his skill and mastery over his followers
grew; and then there came a notable day when up over a thousand miles of
country a melodeon was brought him. Then a wanderer, a minstrel outcast
from a far country, taking refuge in those hills, taught him, and there
was one long year of loving labour together, and merry whisperings
between the two, and secret drawings, and worship of the Golden Pipes;
and then the minstrel died, and left Hepnon alone.

And now they said that Hepnon tried to coax out of the old melodeon the
music of the Golden Pipes. But a look of sorrow grew upon his face, and
stayed for many months. Then there came a change, and he went into the
woods, and began working there in the perfect summer weather; and the
tale went abroad that he was building an organ, so that he might play
for all who came, the music he heard on the Golden Pipes--for they had
ravished his ear since childhood, and now he must know the wonderful
melodies all by heart, they said.

With consummate patience Hepnon dried the wood and fashioned it into
long tuneful tubes, beating out soft metal got from the forge in the
valley to case the lips of them, tanning the leather for the bellows,
stretching it, and exposing all his work to the sun of early morning,
which gave every fibre and valve a rich sweetness, like a sound fruit of
autumn. People also said that he set all the pieces out at sunrise and
sunset that the tone of the Golden Pipes might pass into them, so that
when the organ was built, each part should be saturated with such melody
as it had drawn in, according to its temper and its fibre.

So the building of the organ went on, and a year passed, and then
another, and it was summer again; and soon Hepnon began to build
also--while yet it was sweet weather--a home for his organ, a tall