Whenever the scrape of his
fiddle was heard from below, she dropped whatever she held, whether it
was a hot iron or the baby, and never stopped until she reached the
ground floor. And by and by other children found their way to him, not
only the children of the tenement, but of the whole neighborhood as well.
It was soon noised abroad that he knew how to coax the fairies out of the
woods and actually into the shadows of Calvary Alley where they had never
been heard of before. With one or two children on his knees and a circle
on the floor around him, he would weave a world of dream and rainbows,
and people it with all the dear invisible deities of childhood. And while
he talked, his thin cheeks would flush, and his dim eyes shine with the
same round wonder as his listeners.
But some nights when the children came, they found him too sleepy to tell
stories or play on the fiddle. At such times he always emptied his
pockets of small coins and sent the youngsters scampering away to find
the pop-corn man. Then he would stand unsteadily at the door and watch
them go, with a wistful, disappointed look on his tired old face.
Nance overheard her elders whispering that "he took something," and she
greatly feared that he would meet a fate similar to that of Joe Smelts.
In Joe's case it was an overcoat, and he had been forced to accept the
hospitality of the State for thirty days. Nance's mind was greatly
relieved to find that it was only powders that Mr.
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