e sort of clung to the iron pickets, did the boy, and pressed his face through the fence and listened. Some one was playing the piano in the big house, and the windows with their little diamond panes were flung open to catch the evening breeze. He listened.
His big gray eyes were open wide, the pupils dilated—he was trying to see the music as well as hear it.
The boy's hair matched the yellow of his face, being one shade lighter, sun-bleached from going hatless. His clothes were as yellow as the yellow of his face, and shaded off into the dust that strewed the street. He was like a quail in a stubble-field—you might have stepped over him and never seen him at all. He listened. Almost every evening some one played the piano in the big house. He had discovered the fact a week before, and now, when the dusk was gathering, he would watch his chance and slide away from the hut where his parents lived, and run fast up the hill, and along the shelving roadway to the tall iron fence that marked the residence of Signore Barezzi. He would creep along under the stone wall, and crouching there would wait and listen for the music. Several evenings he had come and waited, and waited, and waited—and not a note or a voice did he hear.
Once it had rained and he didn't mind it much, for he expected every moment the music would strike up, you know—and who cares for cold, or wet, or even hunger, if one can hear good music! The air grew chill and the boy's threadbare jacket stuck to his bony form like a postage-stamp to a letter. Little rivulets of water ran down his hair and streamed off his nose and cheeks. He waited—he was waiting for the music.
He might have waited until the water dissolved his insignificant cosmos into just plain, yellow mud, and then he would have been simply distributed all along the gutter down to the stream, and down the stream to the river, and down the river to the ocean; and no one would ever have heard of him again.
But Signore Barezzi's coachman came along that night, keeping close to the fence under the trees to avoid the wet; and the coachman fell over the boy.
Now, when we fall over anything we always want to kick it—no matter what it is, be it cat, dog, stump, stick, stone or human. The coachman being but clay (undissolved) turned and kicked the boy. Then he seized him by the collar, and accused him of being a thief. The lad acknowledged the indictment, and stammeringly tried to explain that it was only music he was trying to steal; and that it really made no difference because even if one did fill himself full of the music, there was just as much left for other people, since music was different from most things.
The thought was not very well expressed, although the idea was all right, but the coachman failed to grasp it. So he tingled the boy's bare legs with the whip he carried, by way of answer, duly cautioning him never to let it occur again, and released the prisoner on parole.