yet with a content which overrode antipathy to his visitor.

Jethro put the fiddle to his chin, and drew the bow twice or thrice
sweepingly across the strings. Such a sound had never come from Berry's
violin before. It was the touch of a born musician who certainly had
skill, but who had infinitely more of musical passion.

"Made by a slave in the cotton-fields!" Jethro said with a veiled look,
and as though he was thinking of something else: "'Dordi', I'd like to
meet a slave like that!"

At the Romany exclamation Ingolby swept the man with a searching look.
He had heard the Romany wife of Ruliff Zaphe use the word many years ago
when he and Charley Long visited the big white house on the hill. Was
the man a Romany, and, if so, what was he doing here? Had it anything to
do with Gabriel Druse and his daughter? But no--what was there strange
in the man being a Romany and playing the fiddle? Here and there in the
West during the last two years, he had seen what he took to be Romany
faces. He looked to see the effect of the stranger's remark on old
Berry.

"I was a slave, and I was like that. My father made that fiddle in the
cotton-fields of Georgia," the aged barber said.

The son of a race which for centuries had never known country or flag or
any habitat, whose freedom was the soul of its existence, if it had a
soul; a freedom defying all the usual laws of social order--the son of
that race looked at the negro barber with something akin to awe. Here
was a man who had lived a life which was the staring antithesis of his
own, under the whip as a boy, confined to compounds; whose vision was