This was the best part of David to me. He could make any room mystical with the magic of his bow. True, his pieces were mainly venerable dance tunes, cotillions, hornpipes,—melodies which had passed from fiddler to fiddler until they had become veritable folk-songs,—pieces like "Money Musk," "Honest John," "Haste to the Wedding," and many others whose names I have forgotten, but with a gift of putting into even the simplest song an emotion which subdued us and silenced us, he played on, absorbed and intent. From these familiar pieces he passed to others for which he had no names, melodies strangely sweet and sad, full of longing cries, voicing something which I dimly felt but could not understand.

At the moment he was the somber Scotch Highlander, the true Celt, and as he bent above his instrument his black eyes glowing, his fine head drooping low, my heart bowed down in worship of his skill. He was my hero, the handsomest, most romantic figure in all my world.

He played, "Maggie, Air Ye Sleepin," and the wind outside went to my soul. Voices wailed to me out of the illimitable hill-land forests, voices that pleaded:

He appeared to forget us, even his young wife. His eyes looked away into gray storms. Vague longing ached in his throat. Life was a struggle, love a torment.

He stopped abruptly, and put the violin into its box, [Pg 66]fumbling with the catch to hide his emotion and my father broke the tense silence with a prosaic word. "Well, well! Look here, it's time you youngsters were asleep. Beckie, where are you going to pu