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Updated: May 14, 2025
So the Chapmen departed from Goldburg after that Clement had dealt generously by me for thy sake; and when they were gone I bethought me what to do, and thou knowest I can some skill with the fiddle and song, so I betook myself to that craft, both to earn somewhat and that I might gather tidings and be little heeded, till within awhile folk got to know me well, and would often send for me to their merry-makings, where they gave me fiddler's wages, to wit, meat, drink, and money.
Better for her to hae been born a cripple, and carried frae door to door, like auld Bessie Bowie, begging bawbees, than to be a king's daughter, fiddling and flinging the gate she did. I hae often wondered that ony ane that ever bent a knee for the right purpose, should ever daur to crook a hough to fyke and fling at piper's wind and fiddler's squealing.
Then more islands, then more narrer channels, then more broad ones. By Fiddler's Elbow, named Heaven knows for what purpose, for no fiddle nor no elbow wuz in sight, nothin' but island and water and rock all crowned with green verdure.
This place is fearfully hot and oppressive; the bay seems to shut out air from Lake Erie, and I cannot bear to think what that poor boy must have gone through in that close little den, with the printing-press humming and stamping away close to him; but he says it is his native element, and that when he is better he must go to Fiddler's Ranch.
Yes, the cheap Turkey red, and the fiddler's music a half-breed fiddler and the music of a pianist who spends most of his time getting sober. The folks who are all different from what we see them every day. Tough, hard-living, hard-swearing men all hidden up in their Sunday suits, and handing you ceremony as if you were some queen.
It is then that they "cut off the fiddler's head," and play valentines, which they call the "Goggans." The girls set a row of mugs on the hearth in front of the fire, put something into each of them as a symbol of a trade, and troop out to the stairs. Then the boys change the order of the mugs, and the girls come back blindfold, one by one, to select their goggans.
From the first the expression of her love does not ring perfectly true. We suspect her of phrase-making, she is quite too ethereal and ecstatic for a plain fiddler's daughter. No trace here of that homely poetic realism, Gretchen at the wash-tub, or Lotte cutting bread and butter, with which Goethe knew how to invest his bourgeois maidens.
The Kentish smugglers, from whom the cave derives its last title, have undoubtedly made much use of it in days of old. At the period of our story, the entrance to Fiddler's Cave was so much obstructed by rubbish and sand that a man had to stoop low on entering the passage which led to the interior.
Weeks passed, and still they could obtain no clue either to the fiddler's whereabouts or the girl's; and how he could have induced her to go with him remained a mystery.
Evidently they had got to the point where they could stand the fiddler's music no longer, and had put a stop to it. But for all the badness of the music the people should not be deprived of their dance. He hunted up the culprits, who were hovering on the outskirts of the crowd, listening to the threats against and denouncing the vandals who had "shot up" the fiddler.
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