that he had had dreams beyond you, that his fanciful spirit had had
adventures you would give years of your dull life to know.

And yet he was not made only as women are made, fragile and trembling in
his nerves. For he was strong of arm, and there was no place in the hills
to be climbed by venturesome man, which he could not climb with crutch
and shrivelled leg. Also, he was a gallant horseman, riding with his
knees and one foot in stirrup, his crutch slung behind him. It may be
that was why rough men listened to his fancies about the Golden Pipes.
Indeed they would go out at sunrise and look across to where the pipes
hung, taking the rosy glory of the morning, and steal away alone at
sunset, and in some lonely spot lean out towards the flaming instrument
to hear if any music rose from them. The legend that one of the Mighty
Men of the Kimash Hills came here to play, with invisible hands, the
music of the first years of the world, became a truth, though a truth
that none could prove. And by-and-by, no man ever travelled the valley
without taking off his hat as he passed the Golden Pipes--so had a
cripple with his whimsies worked upon the land.

Then, too, perhaps his music had to do with it. As a child he had only a
poor concertina, but by it he drew the traveller and the mountaineer and
the worker in the valley to him like a magnet. Some touch of the
mysterious, some sweet fantastical melody in all he played, charmed them,
even when he gave them old familiar airs. From the concertina he passed
to the violin, and his skill and mastery over his followers grew; and
then there came a notable day when up over a thousand miles of country a
melodeon was brought him. Then a wanderer, a minstrel outcast from a far
country, taking refuge in those hills, taught him, and there was one long
year of loving labour together, and merry whisperings between the two,
and secret drawings, and worship of the Golden Pipes; and then the