Equatoria for several months when Jaffier sent for the Captain.

"I don't feel like it, but I'd better go," the old man said. "Something
amiss is in the air. Damme, I've got all delicate to the saddle since
you came, sir.... I used to think nothing of the ride down town--and
now it's a carriage.... Ah, well, you can try out a new symphony--and
tell me what it says when I get back."

As it turned out, Bedient did exactly this thing.... Time could not
efface the humor evoked by the sight or sound of the magnificent
orchestrelle. During one of the Captain's New York trips, he had heard
a famous orchestra. The effect upon him was of something superhuman.
The Captain went again--followed the musicians to Boston and
Philadelphia. The result was more or less the same. Soul flew in one
direction; mind in another; and, inert before the players--a little fat
man, perspiring, weeping, ecstatic. What came of it, he had told
Bedient in this way:

"The _Hatteras_ was to sail at night-fall, but on that morning I went
into a music-store, not knowing what I wanted exactly,--but a souvenir
of some kind, a book about orchestras. It appears, I told a man there
how I'd been philanderin' with the musicians; how I had caught them in
an off day at Springfield, Mass., and bought cornucopias of Pilsner
until they would have broken down and wept had they not been near their
instruments.... It was a big music-store, and he was a very good man.
He sold me the orchestrelle that morning. You think I had an electric
plant installed down here to light the house and drive my sugar-mill,
don't you? It wasn't that at all, but to run the big music-box yonder.
The man had smoothly attached a current, but he said I could just as
well pump it with my feet. Then he called in a church organist--to