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He sold off several more of his fine vests and browsers, his silver-keyed flute and enameled guitar; and a portion of the money thus furnished was pleasantly spent in refreshing ourselves at the road-side inns in the vicinity of the town. Reclining side by side in some agreeable nook, we exchanged our experiences of the past.
"Yes, too bad," said the sergeant, "when the poor lad didn't even take his own instruments away with him." "Didn't he?" cried Jerry, rather excitedly. "What, not them big and little silver-keyed flutes?" "No; they've got them up in his quarters, keeping them for him. Some of the men are precious wild about what Wilkins said."
His cot-boy used to entertain the sailors with all manner of stories about the silver-keyed flutes and flageolets, fine oil paintings, morocco bound volumes, Chinese chess-men, gold shirt-buttons, enamelled pencil cases, extraordinary fine French boots with soles no thicker than a sheet of scented note-paper, embroidered vests, incense-burning sealing-wax, alabaster statuettes of Venus and Adonis, tortoise-shell snuff-boxes, inlaid toilet-cases, ivory-handled hair-brushes and mother-of-pearl combs, and a hundred other luxurious appendages scattered about this magnificent secretary's state-room.
For lack of anything else in the shape of a weapon, he had brought his silver-keyed flute with him; if he were invaded in the small hours it might serve him again; it seemed to have a virtue for quelling police officials. About three o'clock in the morning he awoke from an uneasy doze, chilled to the marrow, and was prompted to try if the flute would still make music. It would not.
For beneath the helmet and sabre stood a piano open, and with a piece of music on the stand a movement by Chopin; a violoncello leaned in its case in one corner, a cornet-a-piston showed itself, like an arrangement in brass macaroni packed in red velvet upon a side-table; and in front of it lay open a small, flat flute-case, wherein were the two halves of a silver-keyed instrument side by side, in company with what seemed to be its young one so exact in resemblance was the silver-mounted piccolo made to fit into the case.
"The fellow ought to be kicked!" and, as he listened, his hand went involuntarily into his breast-pocket, pressed the button in the side of the morocco flute-case, and extracted the little silver-keyed piccolo from where it reposed in purple velvet beside the two pieces of his flute.
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