Presently there arose in that low hut a long-drawn wailing sound; a minor chord, that seemed like a passionate sob of complaint wrung from a heart newly broken; and with this for his sole prelude the stranger began his theme. What he played, Lucius strove in vain to discover. His memory could recall no such music: Wilder, stranger, more passionate, more solemn, more awful than the strain which Orpheus played in the under world, was that music: more demoniac than that diabolical sonata which Tartini pretended to have composed in a dream. It seemed extemporaneous, for it obeyed none of the laws of harmony, yet even in its discords was scarcely inharmonious. There was melody, too, through all—a plaintive under-current of melody, which never utterly lost itself, even when the player allowed his fancy its wildest flights. The passionate rapture of his haggard, weather-beaten face was reflected in the passionate rapture of his music; but it was not the rapture of joy; rather the sharp agony of those convulsions of the soul which touch the border-line of madness; like the passion of a worshipper at one of those Dionysian festivals in which religious fervour might end in self-slaughter; or like the ‘possession’ of some Indian devil-dancer, leaping and wounding himself under the influence of his demon god. The three men sat and listened, curiously affected by that strange sonata. Even Absalom Schanck, to whom music was about as familiar a language as the Cuneiform character, felt that this was something out of the common way; that it was grander, if not more beautiful, than those graceful compositions of De Beriot or Rode wherewith Lucius Davoren had been wont to amuse his friends in their desolate solitude. Upon Lucius the music had a curious effect. At first and for some time he listened with no feeling but the connoisseur’s unmixed delight. Of envy his mind was incapable, though music is perhaps the most jealous of the arts, and though he felt this man was infinitely his superior—could bring tones out of the heart of that Amati which no power of his could draw from his beloved instrument. But as the man played on, new emotions showed themselves upon Lucius Davoren’s countenance—wonder, perplexity; then a sudden lighting up of passion. His brows contracted; he watched the stranger with gleaming eyes, breathlessly, waiting for the end of the composition. With the final chord he started up from his seat and confronted the man. ‘Were you ever in Hampshire?’ he asked, sharply and shortly. The stranger started ever so slightly at this abrupt interrogatory, but showed no farther sign of discomposure, and laid the fiddle in its case as tenderly as he had taken it thence ten minutes before. ‘Hampshire, Massachusetts?’ he inquired. ‘Yes, many a time.’ ‘Hampshire in England. Were you in that county in the year ’59?’ asked Lucius breathlessly, watching the stranger as he spoke. ‘I was never in England in my life.’