He proved no drone in that little hive, but toiled at such labour as there was to be done with a savage energy which seemed in accord with his half-savage nature. He felled the pine-trunks with his axe, and brought new stores of fuel to the hut. He fetched water from a distant lake, where there was but one corner which the ice had not locked against him. He slept little, and those haggard eyes of his had a strange brightness and vivacity as he sat by the hearth and stared into the fire which his toil had helped to furnish. Though he talked much at times, but always by fits and starts, it was curious to note how rarely he spoke directly of himself or his past life. Even when Lucius questioned him about his musical education, in what school he had learned, who had been his master, he contrived to evade the question. ‘There are some men who have not the knack of learning from other people, but who must be their own teachers,’ he said. ‘I am one of those. Shut me up in a prison for ten years, with my fiddle for my only companion, and when I come out I shall have discovered a new continent in the world of music.’ ‘You play other instruments,’ hazarded Lucius; ‘the cello?’ ‘I play most stringed instruments,’ the other answered carelessly. ‘The piano?’ ‘Yes, I play the piano. A man has fingers; what is there strange in his using them?’ ‘Nothing; only one wonders that you should be content to hide so many accomplishments in the backwoods.’ Matchi shrugged his lean shoulders. ‘There are a thousand various reasons why a man should grow tired of his own particular world,’ he said. ‘To say nothing of the possibility that a man’s own particular world may grow tired of him,’ returned Lucius. Instead of himself and his own affairs—that subject which exalts the most ungifted speaker into eloquence—the stranger spoke of men and manners, the things he had seen from the outside as a mere spectator; the books he had read, and they were legion. Never was a brain stocked with a more heterogeneous collection of ideas. Queer books, out-of-the-way books, had evidently formed his favourite study. Geoffrey heard, and was amused. Lucius heard, and wondered, and rendered to this man that unwilling respect which we give to intellect unallied with the virtues. Thus three days and nights went by, somewhat less slowly than the days had gone of late. On the morning of the fourth the stranger grew impatient—paced the narrow bounds of his hut like an imprisoned jaguar.