"It is only a gypsy; let him lie," they said; and they left him there, and the snow kept him.
His viol they robbed him of, and cast it as a plaything to their children.
But the children could make no melody from its dumb strings. For the viol was faithful; and its music was dead too.
And his own land and his own people knew him never again; and never again at evening was the voice of his viol heard in the stillness, and never again did the young men and maidens dance to his bidding, and the tears and the laughter rise and fall at his will, and the beasts and the birds frisk and sing at his coming, and the children in his footsteps cry, "Lo, it is summer, since Phratos is here!"
BOOK II.
CHAPTER I.
The hottest sun of a hot summer shone on a straight white dusty road.
An old man was breaking stones by the wayside; he was very old, very bent, very lean, worn by nigh a hundred years if he had been worn by one; but he struck yet with a will, and the flints flew in a thousand pieces under his hammer, as though the youth and the force of nineteen years instead of ninety were at work on them.