establishing themselves on the very door-step; and one squatting on the threshold. Meanwhile, the locust kept singing in the great old Pyncheon Elm. “I don’t hear anybody in the house,” said one of the children to another. “The monkey won’t pick up anything here.” “There is somebody at home,” affirmed the urchin on the threshold. “I heard a step!” Still the young Italian’s eye turned sidelong upward; and it really seemed as if the touch of genuine, though slight and almost playful, emotion communicated a juicier sweetness to the dry, mechanical process of his minstrelsy. These wanderers are readily responsive to any natural kindness—be it no more than a smile, or a word itself not understood, but only a warmth in it—which befalls them on the roadside of life. They remember these things, because they are the little enchantments which, for the instant,—for the space that reflects a landscape in a soap-bubble,—build up a home about them. Therefore, the Italian boy would not be discouraged by the heavy silence with which the old house seemed resolute to clog the vivacity of his instrument. He persisted in his melodious appeals; he still looked upward, trusting that his dark, alien countenance would soon be brightened by Phœbe’s sunny aspect. Neither could he be willing to depart without again beholding Clifford, whose sensibility, like Phœbe’s smile, had talked a kind of heart’s language to the foreigner. He repeated all his music over and over again, until his auditors were getting weary. So were the little wooden people in his show-box, and the monkey most of all. There was no response, save the singing of the locust. “No children live in this house,” said a schoolboy, at last. “Nobody lives here but an old maid and an old man. You’ll get nothing here! Why don’t you go along?” “You fool, you, why do you tell him?” whispered a shrewd little Yankee, caring nothing for the music, but a good deal for the cheap rate at which it was had. “Let him play as he likes! If there’s nobody to pay him, that’s his own lookout!” Once more, however, the Italian ran over his round of melodies. To the common observer—who could understand nothing of the case, except the music and the sunshine on the hither side of the door—it might have been amusing to watch the pertinacity of the street-performer. Will he succeed at last? Will that stubborn door be suddenly flung open? Will a group of joyous children, the young ones of the house, come dancing, shouting, laughing, into the open air, and cluster round the show-box, looking with eager merriment at the puppets, and tossing each a copper for long-tailed Mammon, the monkey, to pick up?