CHAPTER II.
IT was just before my merry cousin left us, to return to her own home across the sea.
One day several of us were out walking together. Meta was in front with mamma and one of my elder brothers, I was behind with Tony and Michael, the two nearer my own age. Suddenly Meta glanced round.
"Look, Addie," she called back, "there's a set of Pan-pipes; you wanted to know what they were like. They're a very doleful set, certainly; did you ever see such a miserable object? He must be silly in his head, poor thing, don't you think, aunty? May I give him a penny—or Jack will."
For even Meta did not seem inclined to go too near to the poor man, whom she was indeed right in calling "a miserable object."
Jack ran forward with the penny, and we all stopped for a moment, so I had a full view of the Pan-pipes. They were fastened somehow on to the man's chest, so that their top just came near his lips, and as he moved his head slowly backwards and forwards along them, they gave out the most strange kind of music, if music it could be called, which you ever heard. It was a sort of faint squeak with just now and then a kind of tone in it, like very doleful muffled whistling. Perhaps the sight of the piper himself added to the very "creepy" feeling it gave one. He was not only a piper, he was, or rather had been, an organ-grinder too, for he carried in front of him, fastened by straps round his neck in the usual way, the remains of a barrel organ. It had long ago been smashed to pieces, and really was now nothing but an old broken-in wooden box, with some fragments of metal clinging to it, and the tatters of a ragged cover. But the handle was still there; perhaps it had been stuck in again on purpose; and all the time, as an accompaniment to the forlorn quaver of the reed pipes, you heard the hollow rattle of the loose boards of what had been the barrel-organ. He kept moving the handle round and round, without ever stopping, except for a moment, when Jack half threw, half reached him the penny, which brought a sort of grin on to his face, as he clutched at the dirty old tuft of shag on the top of his head, which he doubtless considered his cap.
"Poor creature," said mamma, as we turned away. "I suppose he thinks he's playing lovely music."
"I've seen him before," said Jack. "Not long after we came here." (Perhaps I should explain that my father was an officer, and we had to go about wherever his regiment was sent.) "But I've not seen him lately. There's some story about him, but I know some of the boys at school declare he's not mad a bit, that he finds it pays well to sham he is."
"Any way he doesn't need to be afraid of his organ wearing out," said Tony, gravely, at which the others couldn't help laughing.