“Oh dear!” she cried, “I wish I could play on that great big beautiful fiddle!”
“So you shall, dearie,” was the weird wee man’s reply. “If you toddle down to me now and then when we are settled, I will teach you on a smaller guitar than this.”
But now the children must go home, and Antonio himself will see them safe to their own gate, for look—
“Just above yon sandy bar,
As the day grows fainter and dimmer,
Lonely and lovely a single star
Lights the air with a dusky glimmer.
Into the ocean faint and far
Falls the trail of its golden splendour
And the gleam of that single star
Is ever refulgent, soft, and tender.”
CHAPTER V
A WONDERFUL EVENING
There is no doubt at all that about this time, and for more than a year afterwards, old Antonio, as the village children called him, was the most remarkable man in Fisherton, or in the regions around it.
But even now, after he had settled down in his strange romantic home, there were not wanting people who shook their heads and said—
“Ay, neighbour, but there is something mysterious about Antonio—something mysterious, and it will all come out one day. Ay, it will all come out! Is he good or is he bad, is he false or is he true? them’s the question, maties.”
“Neighbour,” might be the reply, “what you says is right, but what I says is right too. What I says I do say, and it’s this. A bad un may pretend love for children and for birds and beasts, but if he is bad, then take my word for it, lad, the children and the birds and the beasts won’t care for him. Birds and beasts always act the truth, and wouldn’t tell a lie even if they could talk.