a shoemaker, and destined Hans for the same trade. The boy preferred
to be a fiddler but his father taught him his trade thoroughly with the
end of a strap.

In his eighteenth year Hans suddenly ended the dispute by running away
from home with his beloved fiddle. He made his way to the coast, and got
passage on a cargo tramp to England. There he heard of the wonderful land
called Australia, where gold was to be had for the picking up. The fever
took him, and he worked his passage out to Melbourne on a sailing ship.
He reached the goldfields, dug without success, and would have starved
but for his fiddle. A year found him back in Melbourne, penniless. Here
he met another German in the same condition. They decided to work their
way overland to Sydney, Hans playing the fiddle and his mate singing.
Then began a Bohemian life of music by the wayside inns, sleep in the open
air, and meals when it pleased God to send them.

This had proved to be the solitary sunlit passage in his life, for when he
reached Sydney he found that his music had no money value, and, under the
goad of hunger, took to the trade that he had learned so unwillingly.
Twenty years ago he had opened his small shop on the Botany Road, and
to-day it remained unchanged, dwarfed by larger buildings on either side.
He lived by himself in the room over the shop, where he spent his time
reading the newspaper as a child spells out a lesson, or playing his
beloved violin. He was a good player, but his music was a puzzle and
a derision to Jonah, for his tastes were classical, and sometimes he spent
as much as a shilling on a back seat at a concert in the Town Hall. Jonah
scratched his ear and listened, amazed that a man could play for hours
without finding a tune. The neighbours said that Paasch lived on the
smell of an oil rag; but that was untrue, for he spent hours cooking
strange messes soaked in vinegar, the sight of which turned Jonah's