A Chapter that you can Skip

One day Peter had gone to see this man and had taken little Terence with him. The fiddle was lying on the table. The two men went into another room and left Terence by himself. They were talking busily and they forgot about him. Then they heard a soft little tune played on the fiddle. "Who's that playing my fiddle?" said the owner of it.

"Sure," said Peter, "we left nobody there but Terence."

They went quickly back into the room and found Terence hastily laying the fiddle down where he had found it. "Ah, can't I leave you alone a minute," said Peter, "but you must be meddling with things that don't belong to you? What'll I do now if you've gone and hurt the fiddle?"

"Don't be talking that way to the child," said the musician; "sure he did it no harm. But where at all did he learn to play that way? That's what I'm thinking. Have you been letting him learn all this time and never told me?"

"He never learned at all that I know of," Peter answered. "I never saw him have a fiddle in his hand till this minute."

"It's a strange thing, then," the musician said. "Anybody that can play a tune like he did that one has a right to play more and better. Where did you learn it, my boy?"

"I never learned it at all," Terence answered; "I just saw the fiddle there and I thought I'ld see could I play it. But it's little I could be doing with it, I'm thinking."

Peter was surprised enough to find that Terence could play a tune on a fiddle, and so was Ellen, when she heard about it. But they did not wonder at it so much as they would have done if they had known more about such things. They had a sort of notion that one person could play the fiddle and another could not, much as one person can move his ears and another cannot. So they thought little about it. But when Terence begged them to buy him a fiddle of his own, they saved up money a little at a time, and at last they bought him one.

Then for days Terence did nothing but play. He played simple little tunes at first, but soon he began to play harder ones.