‘Yes; you can play upon it, if you like. It’s a genuine Amati. I have kept it like the apple of my eye.’ ‘Yes, and it’s been uncommonly useful in frightening away the Indians when they’ve come to torment us for fire-water,’ said Geoffrey. ‘We tried watering the rum, but that didn’t answer. The beggars poured a few drops on the fire, and finding it didn’t blaze up, came back and blackguarded us. I only wish I’d brought a few barrels of turpentine for their benefit. Petroleum would have been still better. _That_ would meet their ideas of excellence in spirituous liquors. They like something that scorches their internal economy. They led us a nice life as long as we had any rum; but the violin was too much for them. They’re uncommonly fond of their own music, and would sometimes oblige us with a song which lasted all night, but they couldn’t stand Davoren’s sonatas. Tune up, stranger. I’m rather tired of De Beriot and Spohr and Haydn myself. Perhaps you could oblige us with a nigger melody.’ The stranger waited for no farther invitation, but strode across the narrow hut, and took the violin case from the shelf where it had been carefully bestowed. He laid it on the rough pine-wood table, opened it, and gazed fondly on the Amati reposing in its bed of pale-blue velvet; the very case, or outer husk, a work of art. Lucius watched him as the young mother watches her first baby in the ruthless hands of a stranger. Would he clutch the fiddle by its neck, drag it roughly from its case, at the hazard of dislocation? The surgeon was too much an Englishman to show his alarm, but sat stolid and in agony. No; the unkempt stranger’s bony claws spread themselves out gently, and embraced the polished table of the fiddle. He lifted it as the young mother lifts her darling from his dainty cradle; he put it to his shoulder and lowered his chin upon it, as if in a loving caress. His long fingers stretched themselves about the neck; he drew the bow slowly across the strings. O, what rapture even in those experimental notes! Geoffrey flung a fresh pine-log upon the fire, as if in honour of the coming performance. Absalom sat and dozed, dreaming he was in his cuddy at Battersea, supping upon his beloved sausage. Lucius watched the stranger, with a gaze full of curiosity. He was passionately fond of music, and his violin had been his chief solace in hours of darkest apprehension. Strange to find in this other wanderer mute evidence of the same passion. The man’s hand as it hugged the fiddle, the man’s face as it bent over the strings, were the index of a passion as deep as, or deeper than, his own. He waited eagerly for the man to play.