"Certainly," replied Mercer: "the damp would destroy its tones."
Repeated knocks at the doors, and finally at the windows, satisfied both Cash and Mercer that nobody was at home. In the midst of their disappointment, Cash discovered a singular machine at the end of the gallery, crossed by bars and rollers and surmounted with an enormous crank. Cash approached it on tiptoe; he had a presentiment that he beheld the object of his curiosity, and, as its intricate character unfolded itself, he gazed with distended eyes, and asked Mercer, with breathless anxiety, what that strange and incomprehensible box was.
Mercer turned to the thing as coolly as a north wind to an icicle, and said, that was it.
"That it!" exclaimed Cash, opening his eyes still wider; and then, recovering himself, he asked to see "the tone."
Mercer pointed to the cross-bars and rollers. With trembling hands, with a resolution that would enable a man to be scalped without winking, Cash reached out his hand and seized the handle of the crank (Cash, at heart, was a brave and fearless man). He gave it a turn: the machinery grated harshly, and seemed to clamor for something to be put in its maw.
"What delicious sounds!" said Cash.
"Beautiful!" observed the complacent Mercer, at the same time seizing Cash's arm and asking him to desist, for fear of breaking the instrument or getting it out of tune.
The simple caution was sufficient; and Cash, in the joy of the moment at what he had done and seen, looked as conceited as Mo Mercer himself.
Busy indeed was Cash, from this time forward, in explaining to gaping crowds the exact appearance of the piano, how he had actually taken hold of it, and, as his friend Mo Mercer observed, "pulled music out of it."
The curiosity of the village was thus allayed, and consequently died comparatively away,—Cash, however, having risen to almost as much importance as Mo Mercer, for having seen and handled the thing.