Suspended from the ceiling hung a wooden cage, confining a mocking bird that had become acclimated to the death-dealing atmosphere of tobacco smoke, alcoholic fumes and poetry. All these the songster had endured and survived, nay, thriven upon, lifting up its voice in happy cadence and blithely hopping about its prison, the door of which Straws sometimes opened, permitting the feathered captive the dubious freedom of the room. Pasted on the foot-board of the bed was an old engraving of a wandering musician mountebank, playing a galoubet as an accompaniment to a dancing dog and a cock on stilts, a never-wearying picture for Straws, with his migratory, vagabond proclivities.
A bracket on the wall looked as though it might have been intended for a piece of statuary, or a bit of 291 porcelain or china decoration, but had really been set there for his ink-pot, when he was mindful to work in bed, although how the Muse could be induced to set foot in that old nookery of a room could only be explained through the whims and crotchets of that odd young person’s character.
Yet come she would and did, although she got dust on her flowing skirts when she swept across the threshold; dust on her snow-white gown––if the writers are to be believed in regard to its hue!––when she sat down in the only chair, and dust in her eyes when she flirted her fan. Fortunate was it for Straws that the Muse is a wayward, freakish gipsy; a straggler in attics; a vagrant of the streets; fortunately for him she is not at all the fine lady she has been depicted! Doubtless she has her own reasons for her vagaries; perhaps because it is so easy to soar from the hovel to fairy-land, but to soar from a palace––that is obviously impossible; it is a height in itself! So this itinerant maiden ever yawns amid scenes of splendor, and, from time immemorial, has sighed for lofts, garrets, and such humble places as Straws’ earthly abode.
At the present time, however, Straws was alone. This eccentric but lovely young lady had not deigned to visit him that day. Once, indeed, she had just looked in, but whisked back again into the hall, slamming the door after her, and the pen, momentarily grasped, had fallen from Straws’ hand. Instead of reaching for the ink-bottle he reached in the cupboard 292 for the other bottle. Again she came near entering through the window––having many unconventional ways of coming into a room!––but after looking in for a moment, changed her mind after her fashion and floated away into thin space like the giddy, volatile mistress that she was. After that she appeared no more––probably making a friendly call on some one else!––and Straws resigned himself to her heartless perfidy, having become accustomed to her frivolous, fantastic moods.
Indeed, what else could he have done; what can any man do when his lady-love deserts him, save to make the best of it? But he found his consolation in a pipe; not a pipe of tobacco, nor yet a pipe of old madeira, which, figuratively, most disappointed lovers seek; but a pipe of melody, a pipe of flowing tunes and stirring marches; a pipe of three holes, vulgarly termed by those who know not its high classic origin from the Grecian reeds and its relation to the Pandian pipes, a tin whistle! Thus was Straws classic in his taste, affecting the instrument wherein Acis sighed his soul and breath away for fair Galatea!
It had been a lazy, purposeless day. He had awakened at noon; had coffee and rolls in bed; had dressed, got up, looked out, lain down again, read, and vainly essayed original composition. Now, lying on his back, with the Complete and Classic Preceptor before him, he soothed himself with such music “as washes the every-day dust from the soul.” For a pipe of three holes, his instrument had a remarkable 293 compass; melody followed melody––“The Harp that Once through Tara’s Hall,” “She is Far from the Land,” “In Death I shall Calm Recline,” and other popular pieces. When Straws missed a note he went back to find it; when he erred in a phrase, he patiently repeated it. The cadence in the last mournful selection, “Bid her not shed a tear of sorrow,” was, on his first attempt, fraught with exceeding discord, and he was preparing once more to assault the citadel of grief, entrenched with bristling high notes, when an abrupt knocking at the door, followed by the appearance of a face marred by wrath and adorned with an enormous pair of whiskers, interrupted his attack.
“Sair,” said this person, excitedly, with no more than his head in the room, like a Punch and Judy figure peering from behind a curtain, “you are ze one gran’ nuisance! Eet is zat––what you call eet?––whistle! I am crazee––crazee!”
“Yes; you look it!” replied Straws, sympathetically. “Perhaps, if you had a keep––”
“I am not crazee!” vociferated the man.
“No? Perhaps I could tell better, if I could see more of you. Judging from the sample, I confess to curiosity for a full-length view. If you will step in––”