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"You don't know why they sent that message from Cinq-Cygne at this hour, do you? It is half-past nine o'clock." "It must have been something pressing. The gentleman had only just returned from Gondreville." "Gondreville! has he been to Gondreville?" "He dined there, monsieur. If you went to the Mulet you'd laugh! The little tiger is, saving your presence, as drunk as a fiddler.
There you have his phraseology.... They see a man to save, to raise up, and convert into a great artist, and almost all of them yield to this temptation." "That is comical," said Caesar, looking curiously at the fiddler and his lady.
At every noise I peered out, hoping for the doctor. But he did not come. And then, as I fell back into the fauteuil, there was borne on my consciousness a sound I had heard before. It was the music of the fiddler, it was a tune I knew, and the voices of the children were singing the refrain: "Ne sait quand reviendra, Ne sait quand reviendra."
I thought so too; every one was happy, and every one at their ease; and I do believe they would have stayed much longer, but the musicians took so much punch that one fiddler broke his fiddle, the other broke his head in going down the steps into the garden, and the fifer swore he could blow no longer; so, as there was an end to the music, clogs, pattens, and lanterns were called for, the shawls were brought out of the kitchen, and every one went away.
"I swear it on my word as a gentleman," said Fiddler, "but for heaven's sake don't read it over again. I'll take it for granted. Besides I always cry when we get to the Tiny Tim part, so I say Force, don't you cry?" "I did to-night," said Sydney Force, his face beaming. "And you, Diggs?" "Like a blooming baby, sir," said Diggs, and Watson blew his nose violently.
While this was going on, the young women recovered their equanimity, and hearing the horses break away from their assailants, directed the negro to close the door; which after some difficulty he succeeded in doing. Twenty wolves were thus snugly trapped. One of the girls soon proposed that the old fiddler should play a few tunes to the animals, which were now whining in their cage.
He talked and wrote about the privileges of blood in the style of Sieyes; but in practice no chapter in the empire looked with a keener eye to genealogies and quarterings. Such was Frederic the Ruler. But there was another Frederic, the Frederic of Rheinsberg, the fiddler and flute-player, the poetaster and metaphysician.
Young men and rosy-checked girls, with smiles on their faces, were dancing to the sound of a fiddle. It was the pleasantest sight that Daffydowndilly had yet met with, and it comforted him for all his disappointments. "O, let us stop here," cried he to his companion; "for Mr. Toil will never dare to show his face where there is a fiddler, and where people are dancing and making merry.
The head, with its long, blowsy yellow hair, was bowed over the dark polished wood of the instrument; the eyes were half closed; the right arm, despite the eccentric patches on the sleeve of the old brown-jeans coat, moved with free, elastic gestures in all the liberties of a practiced bowing. If he saw the hunter motionless on the brink of the crag, the fiddler gave no intimation.
"Pray let us go a little farther," said Daffydowndilly. "I don't like the looks of this fiddler at all." Well, thus the stranger and little Daffydowndilly went wandering along the highway, and in shady lanes, and through pleasant villages; and whithersoever they went, behold! there was the image of old Mr. Toil. He stood like a scarecrow in the cornfields.
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