The next musical adventure of Apollos was effected by exchanging a young and tender calf for a fiddle! Every muscle of his long arm, became as a separate fiddle-bow, giving forth such endless _see-sawing_ and _tweedle-dee-ing_ that every good wife in the neighborhood was tempted to complain of him as a nuisance, for waking up all the babies and disturbing them in their first sleep, for the strains of Apollos, like those of “sweet Philomela,” were only heard at night. But notwithstanding all this Apollos was a general favorite, for the spirit of harmony pervaded his bosom for all animate and inanimate objects—there was to him music in all created things. His heart was gentle—his hand ever ready to do a kindness, and therefore he was suffered to fiddle to his bent, little dreaming the anathemas which the deed, not the doer, nightly originated. * * * * * Side by side stood the cottages of Leonard Davis and Luther Howell, and side by side grew up the two lovely children Paul and Linda. Neither Davis nor Howell were in good circumstances, although both owned the farms on which they lived; yet there was a great difference in the character of the two men, which in the end led to very different results. Leonard Davis was a thriftless, indolent man, who loved better to smoke his pipe under the tavern porch, and give forth his opinions upon the politics of the day, than to cultivate his land or keep his fences in order. Luther Howell, on the contrary, was a hard-working, industrious man. He loved money although he had but little of it—yet he resolved to have more; and upon the strength of that determination dug and delved away his days, almost begrudging even the Sabbath rest.