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This was my young friend Kabba Rega's idea of happiness to go to sleep drunk, assisted by the strains of self-playing melody. Of course, the large musical box was asked for; and, of course, I promised to give it as a present from the Khedive of Egypt, if I found that Kabba Rega conducted himself properly. A small and beautifully-made revolver, with seven chambers, now attracted his attention.

So Astrach arose and speedily dressed himself, pulled on his stockings and boots, washed, and said his prayers, bowing himself north, south, east, and west, and made ready to take leave of the witch. Then she said: "How! will you go away without asking an old woman like me how you can gain the Self-playing Harp?"

Then she rose and crossed to the golden-oak piano between the windows, her negligee open its full length and revealing her nightdress; crossed with a slight limp and the dog yapping at the soiled and lacy train; fell to manipulating the self-playing attachment, peddling out a metallic avalanche of popular music.

There are a big exercise deck and a reading-room with plenty of books. Not the least important part of the equipment is a self-playing piano and a good assortment of music. There is not very much to see after one reaches Guam. One village is just about the same as all the others.

After he had done this he came back to the organ and detached the self-playing "arrangement" without comment, and seated himself at the console. Laura lay back in a long chair close at hand. The moment was propitious. The artist's profile silhouetted itself against the shade of a light that burned at the side of the organ, and that gave light to the keyboard.

She pushed back from the table. "We're invited over to the Duncans' to-night for supper. They've one of the new self-playing pianos." He felt in his waistcoat pocket for the toothpick. "I'll go if you want it, Lilly, but guess where I'd rather eat my supper." "Where?" "Right here. And fry the sirloin the way Mother Becker does it, Lilly, sprinkle a few onions on it.

"Tell me, good youth, whither art thou travelling to what far country? and dost thou go of thine own free will or no?" And Prince Astrach answered: "Willingly as I go, yet I go twice as unwillingly through thrice nine lands into the thirtieth kingdom, the domain of the deathless Kashtshei, to fetch the Self-playing Harp." "Ho! ho! ho!" cried the old witch.

So saying he seized his sword from the wall to slay the Tsarevna; but at the same moment Astrach, the King's son, crushed the egg, and Kashtshei fell dead upon the ground like a sheaf of corn. Then the Tsarevna Darisa led Astrach into the palace, where was the Self-playing Harp, and said to him: "The Harp is now thine take it; but in return for it, conduct me back to my home."

"Maybe our piano has one of those self-playing tricks, and somebody wound it up by accident." But no sooner were the lights out and the house quiet than the piano started again. "Hush! keep quiet!" whispered Uncle Daniel. "I'll get it this time, whatever it is!"

Some decades later, and with an endurance stroke that far outclassed classic Leander's, Simon Binswanger had swum the great Hellespont that surged between the Lower East Side and the Upper West Side, and, trolling his family after, landed them in one of those stucco-fronted, elevator-service apartment-houses where home life is lived on the layer, and the sins of the extension sole and the self-playing piano are visited upon the neighbor below.