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Updated: June 12, 2025
"What is the value of the evidence of the senses if a suggestion can make us see the hat, but not the man who wears it; or dance half the night with an imaginary partner? Am I 'I myself, I, or am I a barrel-organ playing 'God save the Queen, if the stops are set in the normal fashion, but the 'Marseillaise' if some cunning hand has altered them without my knowledge?
Everyone was talking busily in the hall, drowning the sound of her footsteps. She had forgotten her gloves. She went back into the cool grey musty rooms. A little crack in an upper pane shone like a gold thread. The barrel-organ piped. As she stooped to gather up her gloves from the floor she felt the cold stone firm and secure under her hand.
He was only aware that, when they were both at home, Hatteras would come through it of an evening and smoke on his verandah. Then he would sit for hours cursing the country, raving about the lights in Piccadilly-circus, and offering his immortal soul in exchange for a comic-opera tune played upon a barrel-organ.
By day, are there no Punches, Fantoccini, Dancing-dogs, Jugglers, Conjurers, Orchestrinas, or even Barrel-organs? No, not one. Yes, I remember one. One barrel-organ and a dancing-monkey sportive by nature, but fast fading into a dull, lumpish monkey, of the Utilitarian school. Beyond that, nothing lively; no, not so much as a white mouse in a twirling cage. Are there no amusements? Yes.
It was a street of dingy houses huddled together; many of the windows had been broken and were clumsily repaired with strips of French newspaper; the doors had not been painted for years; there were shabby little shops on the ground floor, laundries, cobblers, stationers. Ragged children played in the road, and an old barrel-organ was grinding out a vulgar tune.
Among other things are two of the chorals; pieces of rawhide used for tying the beams, etc., in the original construction; the head of a bass-viol that used to be played by one of the Indians; a small mortar; and quite a number of books. Perhaps the strangest thing in the whole collection is an old barrel-organ made by Benjamin Dobson, The Minories, London.
Chops indulges himself in the pleasing delusion that one of these days he is to Come Into his Property, his ideas respecting which are never realised by him so powerfully as when he sits upon a barrel-organ and has the handle turned! "Arter the wibration has run through him a little time," says Mr. Magsman, "he screeches out, 'Toby, I feel my property a-coming gr-r-rind away!
The sound of their strident voices floated upwards, the high nasal note of the predominant Americans, the shrill laughter of girls quick to appreciate the wit of such of their male companions as thought it worth while to be amusing. A young man was playing the banjo. In the distance a barrel-organ was grinding out a pot pourri of popular airs. Anna raised her eyes.
The ceiling was that of the kitchen, and was merely of boards, which, being old and shrunken, had here and there a considerable crack between two, and Gibbie, peeping through one after another of these cracks, soon saw several things he did not understand. Of such was a barrel-churn, which he took for a barrel-organ, and welcomed as a sign of civilization.
He might take to a barrel-organ but that would be a cruel waste of his artistic touch. Perhaps he would die on a doorstep, like the professor of many languages whose starvation was recorded in that very morning's paper. Thus, driven by the saturnine necessity that sneers at our puny resolutions, Lancelot began to meditate surrender. For surrender of some sort must be either of life or ideal.
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