"There's a thunderstorm comin'," he said. "That's what it is;
and the sooner it comes the better."

He went to the back door, and stared at the blackness to the east,
and, sure enough, lightning was blinking there.

"It's coming, sure enough; just hang out and keep cool for another hour,
and you'll feel the difference."

He sat down again on the three-legged stool, folded his arms, with his elbows
on his knees, drew a long breath, and blinked at the clay floor for a while;
then he twisted the stool round on one leg, until he faced
the old-fashioned spired wooden clock (the brass disc of the pendulum
moving ghost-like through a scarred and scratched marine scene
-- Margate in England -- on the glass that covered the lower half)
that stood alone on the slab shelf over the fireplace. The hands indicated
half-past two, and Johnny, who had studied that clock and could "hit the time
nigh enough by it," after knitting his brows and blinking at the dial
for a full minute by its own hand, decided "that it must be getting on
toward nine o'clock."

It must have been the heat. Johnny stood up, raking his hair,
turned to the door and back again, and then, after an
impatient gesture, took up his fiddle and raised it to his shoulder.
Then the queer thing happened. He said afterwards, under conditions
favourable to such sentimental confidence, that a cold hand seemed to take
hold of the bow, through his, and -- anyway, before he knew what he was about
he had played the first bars of "When First I Met Sweet Peggy",
a tune he had played often, twenty years before, in his courting days,