He waved his hand to me.
"Good-bye, Hottentot," he called, mischievously.
"Good-bye," I answered, in rather a plaintive voice.
I did not think that I liked my new name.
That was the first occasion on which I heard of my music lessons, but not the last. My mother seemed to take wonderfully to the idea. She was always discussing the things that she meant us to learn, but up to then we had been too small for any of her plans to be of much importance. To take music lessons was a very simple matter. It could not be considered work, but play on a larger scale; and after I had slipped into the parlor, and touched the piano keys with a timorous finger, I knew that I should like it. The keys were voices. When grown-up people touched them, they sang together beautifully. There was one which was a fairy queen, and one which was a prince, and one away down in the lower bass made me tremble when it talked. That was an ogre. I thought that he might eat little children. I ran out of the parlor in a hurry for fear that he should catch me. Something pattered up the stairs behind me, and chased me along the hall, but in my mother's room not even an ogre would dare to come.
"She loves music!" my mother cried. "She is always hanging around the piano."
Grandmother looked at me curiously.
"There has never been a musician in our family," she remarked, in a dubious way.
"I played before I was married," my mother answered. "There doesn't seem to be any time for it now."
She sighed a little as she spoke.