“Dull story!”
“Dull story!” went round all the room.
“Shall we tell her the story of the kind child, who gives her bit of cake to the hungry child, who is gentle also with the sick and the old, and how the pretty robin lights upon her wrist, and its little whistle seems to say, ‘I love you—I love you’?”
“Play the flute!” interrupted the same boy’s voice.
“Yes, the flute! the flute!” echoed the children in a chorus.
“They always like my flute,” Daddy Coax whispered to Kitty with a pleased wink. “I don’t take it out often—for next to the children I love my flute.”
He drew from his breast-pocket a flute with keys of ivory and wiped it softly on his coat-sleeve. “I’ll play the lullaby of the wind to the good children. The words and the music came into my head last night as the wind rattled against my window-panes. Listen, I’ll sing you the words first—that is, what the wind says through the flute to the good children.”
Nodding his head on one side, with one finger up, swaying it softly to the measure, in a thin cracked voice Daddy Coax hummed:
“When all the world is blind with sleep
And birds are silent in the trees,