“How silly you are, Hulda!” said Othmar, almost angrily. “Of course I shall come back, but I shall go with him as far as he wants, and then, perhaps, he will let me hear him play again.” Othmar and the little dwarf started with the mule laden with instruments, and Othmar led the way down the best road. The dwarf did not speak at all, and so they went on in silence till they had got on to the top of a high hill where they could see the country all round for miles, and the moon was beginning to rise. Here the musician stopped his mule, and stood for a while looking all round. Then he turned, and said to Othmar—“I know now where I am, and here will I stay for to-night, but first before you leave me, would you not like to hear my fiddles and horns again?” “That I would,” cried Othmar, and he sat himself down on the ground delighted, while the little man unloaded the mule. “And now,” he said to Othmar with a twisted smile, “you shall hear them play as no one has ever heard them. Yes, and you shall see them too;” then he laid them in rows—the fiddles first, and the viols, and then the horns and trumpets, and last the drums and cymbals and triangles, and clapped his hands, giving a long, shrill whistle. As he whistled, the instruments rose from the ground, and they began to swell, and their shapes to change till no longer did they look like musical instruments, but like human beings, only each had in a strange way kept the shape it had formerly. The flutes and pipes were tall and thin, and they and the violins had changed into beautiful girls with slender throats, and the trumpets were all men and boys of different sizes, but the drum was the strangest of all, for it was a fat man with very short legs. The moon had risen and Othmar could see them all quite clearly, and though he trembled with fear and his heart beat high, yet still he watched. They stood silent together for a space in a weird crowd, and then the dwarf waved his arms and called, “Ay! are you all there, my children?—yes, one, two three four five, six seven eight, nine ten eleven twelve, thirteen—that is right. Come practice, practice, practice, and then you shall have a game, and see who Othmar loves best, and who he will kiss first.”