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almost always looked out of his doorway at the far, fine blue sky over the tops of the
crowding maples. But to-day he was not looking at the sky, instead, he was staring at
the black, dusty rafters of his kitchen, where hung dried meats and strings of onions and
bunches of herbs and fishing tackle and guns and skins.
But old Abel saw not these things; his face was the face of a man who beholds visions,
compact of heavenly pleasure and hellish pain, for old Abel was seeing what he might
have been- -and what he was; as he always saw when Felix Moore played to him on the
violin. And the awful joy of dreaming that he was young again, with unspoiled life before
him, was so great and compelling that it counterbalanced the agony in the realization of
a dishonoured old age, following years in which he had squandered the wealth of his
soul in ways where Wisdom lifted not her voice.
Felix Moore was standing opposite to him, before an untidy stove, where the noon fire
had died down into pallid, scattered ashes. Under his chin he held old Abel's brown,
battered fiddle; his eyes, too, were fixed on the ceiling; and he, too, saw things not
lawful to be uttered in any language save that of music; and of all music, only that given
forth by the anguished, enraptured spirit of the violin. And yet this Felix was little more
than twelve years old, and his face was still the face of a child who knows nothing of
either sorrow or sin or failure or remorse. Only in his large, gray-black eyes was there
something not of the child--something that spoke of an inheritance from many hearts,
now ashes, which had aforetime grieved and joyed, and struggled and failed, and
succeeded and grovelled. The inarticulate cries of their longings had passed into this
child's soul, and transmuted themselves into the expression of his music.
Felix was a beautiful child. Carmody people, who stayed at home, thought so; and old
Abel Blair, who had roamed afar in many lands, thought so; and even the Rev. Stephen
Leonard, who taught, and tried to believe, that favour is deceitful and beauty is vain,
thought so.
He was a slight lad, with sloping shoulders, a slim brown neck, and a head set on it with
stag-like grace and uplift. His hair, cut straight across his brow and falling over his ears,
after some caprice of Janet Andrews, the minister's housekeeper, was a glossy blue-
black. the skin of his face and hands was like ivory; his eyes were large and beautifully
tinted--gray, with dilating pupils; his features had the outlines of a cameo. Carmody
mothers considered him delicate, and had long foretold that the minister would never
bring him up; but old Abel pulled his grizzled moustache when he heard such
forebodings and smiled.
"Felix Moore will live," he said positively. "You can't kill that kind until their work is done.
He's got a work to do--if the minister'll let him do it. And if the minister don't let him do it,
then I wouldn't be in that minister's shoes when he comes to the judgment--no, I'd rather
be in my own. It's an awful thing to cross the purposes of the Almighty, either in your
own life or anybody else's. Sometimes I think it's what's meant by the unpardonable sin-
-ay, that I do!"
Carmody people never asked what old Abel meant. They had long ago given up such
vain questioning. When a man had lived as old Abel had lived for the greater part of his
life, was it any wonder he said crazy things? And as for hinting that Mr. Leonard, a man
who was really almost too good to live, was guilty of any sin, much less an
unpardonable one--well, there now! what use was it to be taking any account of old
Abel's queer speeches? Though, to be sure, there was no great harm in a fiddle, and
maybe Mr. Leonard was a mite too strict that way with the child. But then, could you
wonder at it? There was his father, you see.
Felix finally lowered the violin, and came back to old Abel's kitchen with a long sigh. Old
Abel smiled drearily at him--the smile of a man who has been in the hands of the
tormentors.
"It's awful the way you play--it's awful," he said with a shudder. "I never heard anything
like it--and you that never had any teaching since you were nine years old, and not
much practice, except what you could get here now and then on my old, battered fiddle.
And to think you make it up yourself as you go along! I suppose your grandfather would
never hear to your studying music--would he now?"
Felix shook his head.
"I know he wouldn't, Abel. He wants me to be a minister. Ministers are good things to
be, but I'm afraid I can't be a minister."
"Not a pulpit minister. There's different kinds of ministers, and each must talk to men in
his own tongue if he's going to do 'em any real good," said old Abel meditatively.
"YOUR tongue is music. Strange that your grandfather can't see that for himself, and
him such a broad-minded man! He's the only minister I ever had much use for. He's
God's own if ever a man was. And he loves you--yes, sir, he loves you like the apple of
his eye."
"And I love him," said Felix warmly. "I love him so much that I'll even try to be a minister
for his sake, though I don't want to be."
"What do you want to be?"
"A great violinist," answered the child, his ivory-hued face suddenly warming into living
rose. "I want to play to thousands--and see their eyes look as yours do when I play.
Sometimes your eyes frighten me, but oh, it's a splendid fright! If I had father's violin I
could do better. I remember that he once said it had a soul that was doing purgatory for
its sins when it had lived on earth. I don't know what he meant, but it did seem to me
that HIS violin was alive. He taught me to play on it as soon as I was big enough to hold
it."
"Did you love your father?" asked old Abel, with a keen look.
Again Felix crimsoned; but he looked straightly and steadily into his old friend's face.
"No," he said, "I didn't; but," he added, gravely and deliberately, "I don't think you should
have asked me such a question."
It was old Abel's turn to blush. Carmody people would not have believed he could blush;
and perhaps no living being could have called that deepening hue into his weather-
beaten cheek save only this gray-eyed child of the rebuking face.
"No, I guess I shouldn't," he said. "But I'm always making mistakes. I've never made
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