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A Chapter that you can Skip

Then he got impatient with himself, as it seemed, and he began to play such music as nobody who heard him had ever heard before. Often he would not play when he was asked, but he would play for hours by himself, when he thought that no one was listening. His father brought his friend the musician to hear him, and he said that it was wonderful. He had never heard the fiddle played so well. Nobody had ever heard the fiddle played so well.

And Kathleen never cared to hear Terence play. She did hear him play, many times, of course, and she listened politely, but she told her grandmother that she did not care about it at all. She would much rather hear the poor fiddler of the little orchestra, who had come from their county in Ireland. Their neighbor the fiddler himself was as much shocked as anyone to hear Kathleen talk like this. "Did you ever hear anybody play the fiddle like Terence plays it?" he asked her, when she said something of the sort to him.

"No," Kathleen answered. "I never heard anybody play it like Terence, but I have heard some play it better than Terence. You play it better."

"Oh, child," he said, "I'ld give all the money I'll be earning in the next ten years if I could play like he does. Don't you see I can't do half the things he does with it?"

"I know that," Kathleen said; "it isn't the way he plays a bit that makes everybody talk so about him; it's just the things he does. When he plays a tune it just doesn't mean anything, and when you play a tune it does."

And that was as near as Kathleen could ever come to telling why she did not care about Terence's playing. Everybody else said that it was wonderful, but she said that it didn't mean anything. And when Kathleen talked in this way they said that she was too critical. That is what people will always tell you when you can see through a fraud and they cannot.

You will suppose, without my telling you, that as soon as Kathleen was old enough to listen to them, her grandmother began telling her the old stories of Ireland.

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