"I greet you! I salute you, my young lord!" The fiddler rose from his inclination and burst out laughing. "Oh, cease fondling those pistols in your pocket, worthy sir," cried he, "for by Calliope, daughter of Jove and Mnemosyne, 'tis not your money-bags I covet just now, but, oh! your golden youth!"
"The fellow has a wild eye," thought the gentleman. Now, it is a question whether even a highway robber were not more agreeable to encounter on a lonely road than a madman.
"If it be madness to honour in you such a gift of the gods," said the singular vagrant, reading the thought, "why then, yes, I am mad, sir—stark, staring."
He fell back on one foot and bent the advanced knee, tucked his instrument under his chin, where it settled like a bird to its nest, and drew his bow across the strings with a long plaint.
"O youth!" he intoned between two sighs of the catgut. "O spring! O wings of the soul! O virginity of the heart, expectation, unknown mysteries of life! O wealth of strength and yearning!—See, now, how you sit," he cried, dropping into speech again, "on the fringe of the forest, in a strange land, with the sunset valley at your feet, and the stream running you know not where beside you, and the bird over your head singing the desires of your soul. Why, by Apollo, young man, here are you in your youth, in the spring of your world, in the very middle of an adventure, and——"
Again limber fingers moved along the strings; and, with a sense of wonder, the traveller felt within his being some answering outcry. But he stiffened himself against it.
"Harkee, my man," said he, trying to frown, "I am in no mood for fooling. Take up your florin, and begone.—Or, stay, earn another by telling me, if you can, where I am, and how far lies the nearest village?"
"Sir," replied the other, urbanely, "fellow-travellers should assist each other without any sordid consideration. (Ah, had you offered me of your youth, now!) You are, an it please you, just between the border of that old, steady-going principality of Schwarzburg and the new-fangled, patchwork kingdom which appertaineth to his Majesty King Jerome—himself one of the crowning products of the Great Revolution!"
"Faugh!" said the gentleman.
The fiddler's restless eye lighted.