"I don't want 'em to skeer him off, for it ain't every night Lute takes
kindly to his fiddle. There's times he won't touch it for days and days.
Talkin' about Lute's fiddlin'--I suppose it's true--there was some
fellows out from Boston happened to hear him playin' one night, up to
Sandwich te-own, and they offered him a hundred and fifty a month--I
Reckon that's true--to go along with some fiddlin' company thar' to
Boston, and he'd got more if he'd stuck to it, but Lute, he come driftin'
back in the course of a week or two. I don't blame him. He said he was
sick on't.
"I tell you how 'tis, teacher. Folks that lives along this shore are
allus talkin' more'n any other sort of folks about going off, and
complainin' about the hard livin', and cussin' the stingy sile, but
thar's suthin' about it sorter holts to 'em. They allus come a driftin'
back in some shape or other, in the course of a year or two at the
farderest."
The door was thrown wide open and my recreant guests reappeared
half-dragging, half-pushing before them a matchless Adonis in glazed
tarpaulin trousers and a coarse sailor's blouse.
I recognized at once in the perfect physical beauty of the eccentric
fiddler only a reproduction, in a larger form, of that sadly depraved
young cherub who had danced before me in ghostly habiliments on the way
to school.
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