It was an hour of the hot summer afternoon when few people were abroad. It was plain that Hopewell Drugg had no customer just then, for the strains of his violin came to them as Janice and Miss ’Rill approached the yard gate. The violinist’s bow wandered over the strings as though his mind wandered, too, while he played. Whereas, the plaintive strains of “Silver Threads Among the Gold” had first been borne to their ears, the callers suddenly realized that Mr. Drugg had trailed off into the livelier measures of “Jingle bells! Jingle bells! Jingle all the way!”
“For the land’s sake!” said Miss ’Rill, in mild surprise. “That sleighing song maybe is cooling on a hot day like this, but I never heard Hopewell play it before.”
Janice laughed aloud. “It must be much more in tune with his feelings, Miss ’Rill, than any sad melody. Music, they say, is an expression of the soul’s feelings. Mr. Drugg’s soul is happy now.”
The little old maid flushed very prettily. Then she gave her head a queer little birdlike toss.
“Music may express the feelings of some souls,” she said drily; “but if that’s so, I wonder what kind of souls the composers of some of these new-fangled tunes I hear the boys whistling must have? There’s some of them that sound as though the composers had neither brains nor soul that together would be bigger’n a pea, I declare!”
Unlike her mother, Miss ’Rill was not often critical; but she had become quite earnest in this expression of her opinion and was still flushed when they came in sight of Hopewell sawing on his fiddle as he sat on the shaded porch. He broke off guiltily in the middle of
“Oh, what fun it is to ride
In a one-horse open sleigh!”
“Oh, do keep on, Mr. Drugg,” begged Janice. “I wouldn’t have come if I’d thought it would stop your music.”
“I know you’ve come to read my little Lottie’s letter, Miss Janice,” he said, in his shy way, and hastened to bring it. Then he picked up the violin again and fingered the strings lightly and absently as Janice unfolded the letter from the little girl who had been blind.