I got over my terror of the dog. I entered the house with Mr. Sargeant and I was struck dumb with astonishment. All the walls were covered with guns. From top to bottom. And on the floor lay a skin with the head of a lion or a leopard. It had terribly sharp teeth. But the lion was half an evil. After all, it was dead. But the guns. The guns! I did not even care about the fresh plums and the apples which the master of the house offered me out of his own garden. My eyes did not cease leaping from one wall to the other.... But later on, when Tchitchick took a little fiddle out of a red drawer--a beautiful, round little fiddle, with a curious little belly, let his big spreading beard droop over it, and held it with his big strong hands, and drew the bow across the strings a few times, backwards and forwards, I forgot, in the blinking of an eye, the black dog and the terrible lion, and the loaded guns. I only saw before me Tchitchick's spreading beard and his black, lowered eyebrows. I only saw a round little fiddle with a curious little belly, and fingers which danced over the strings so rapidly that no human brain could answer the questions which arose to my mind: "Where does one get so many fingers?" Presently, Tchitchick and his spreading beard, vanished, along with his thick eyebrows and his wonderful fingers. And I saw nothing at all before me. I only heard a singing, a groaning, a weeping, a sobbing, a talking, and a growling. They were extraordinary, peculiar sounds that I heard, the like of which I had never heard before, in all my life. Sounds sweet as honey, and smooth as oil were pouring themselves right into my heart, without ceasing. And my soul went off somewhere far from the little house, into another world, into a Garden of Eden which was nothing else but beautiful sounds--which was one mass of singing, from beginning to end.... "Do you want some tea?" asked Tchitchick of me, putting down the little fiddle, and slapping me on the shoulder. I felt as if I had fallen down from the seventh heaven on to the earth. From that day I visited Tchitchick regularly every Sabbath afternoon, to hear him playing the fiddle. I went straight to the house. I was afraid of no one; and I even became such good friends with the black dog that, when he saw me, he wagged his tail, and wanted to fall upon me to lick my hands. I would not let him do this. "Let us rather be good friends from the distance." At home not even a bird knew where I spent the Sabbath afternoons. I was a bridegroom-elect, after all. And no one would have known of my visits to Tchitchick to this day, if a new misfortune had not befallen me--a great misfortune, of which I will now tell you. * * *