Conceive his perfect rapture as thus, so near the centre of attraction, the sweet strains encompassed him about. They ceased, and then to the window, still warbling, the young girl came, and leaning from the casement, stretched forth her little white hand, and began plucking the leaves from the very tree whose shadowing branches waved around the head of Apollos.
A sweet face becomes almost as the face of an angel, when seen in the calm moonlight; and as Linda stood there, her large, brown eyes, looking out into the holy night, her high, pure forehead clasped in the glossy braids of her dark hair, and her light, graceful figure folded in a snowy robe, no wonder she seemed to Apollos too pure, too beautiful, for a being of earth’s mould. But while he gazed and gazed, she turned away, and with her took the heart of Apollos. Again seating herself at the piano, Linda ran her fingers over the keys with the lightness of a bird upon the wing, and one of Beethoven’s exquisite sonatas awoke to life under her touch.
Poor Apollos! No volition had he of his own—he went whither the fates impelled him. Step by step did he approach the open casement, and as some poor bird is drawn, little by little, into the very mouth of its fascinating destroyer, even so was Apollos drawn head and shoulders into the window. The moon beams danced around him, as if enjoying the mischief they were about to disclose, and gleamed coldly but steadily upon him, his elbows resting on the sill, and his long legs, curved outward, like those of a grasshopper. At last, rising from the instrument, Linda closed it, and was about to approach the window, when the strange apparition of Apollos glared upon her. With a loud shriek she rushed from the room; as for Apollos, he bounded away like a madman—
“Swift on the right—swift on the left,
Sweeps every scene asunder—
Heaths, meadows, fields—how swift their flight,
And now the bridges thunder!”
That night Apollos Dalrymple was convicted of having seen a ghost.
And now, from that eventful evening, Cupid ensconced himself within the virgin heart of Apollos, and there the little rascal sat perched upon a hill of ancient ballads, delighted with the mischief he was doing, and every now and then beating up such a rub-a-dub as well-nigh drove poor Apollos distracted. For here were garnered up stores of the dainty food which the poets have appropriated exclusively to the little god—not, to be sure, the fastidious fare of a modern amateur, supping only on the tongues of Italian or Swedish nightingales, but the good, substantial fare our forefathers loved.
By the death of his father all those goodly acres had descended to Apollos; but this year the farm proved a losing concern, for the sheep died from starvation—the cattle from over-feeding—the hoe cut down both corn and weed—the grass luxuriated in freedom from the scythe, and the grain from the sickle, until both were over-ripe. The people all thought Apollos bewitched, and bewitched he certainly was. Even the fiddle was suffered to be mute, unless when seizing it with sudden furor he would strive to repeat some note which the voice of Linda had fastened upon his memory, but as sure as he did so, her image appeared at his working elbow, and Cupid, with a jog, jumped astride the fiddle-bow.