really set in it would get acidity of the stomach. But there was no
sense in these town folk.

"Are you really asleep, booby? Why, you are snoring, deuce take me!"

The young master came limping in, took a drink, and buried himself
in his book. As he read he whistled softly in time with the hammer-
strokes of the others. Little Nikas began to whistle too, and the
two older apprentices who were beating leather began to strike in
time with the whistling, and they even kept double time, so that
everything went like greased lightning. The journeyman's trills and
quavers became more and more extraordinary, in order to catch up
with the blows--the blows and the whistling seemed to be chasing one
another--and Master Andres raised his head from his book to listen.
He sat there staring into the far distance, as though the shadowy
pictures evoked by his reading were hovering before his eyes. Then,
with a start, he was present and among them all, his eyes running
over them with a waggish expression; and then he stood up, placing
his stick so that it supported his diseased hip. The master's hands
danced loosely in the air, his head and his whole figure jerking
crazily under the compulsion of the rhythm.

_Swoop!_--and the dancing hands fell upon the cutting-out
knife, and the master fingered the notes on the sharp edge, his head
on one side and his eyes closed--his whole appearance that of one
absorbed in intent inward listening. But then suddenly his face
beamed with felicity, his whole figure contracted in a frenzy of
delight, one foot clutched at the air as though bewitched, as though
he were playing a harp with his toes--Master Andres was all at once
a musical idiot and a musical clown. And _smack!_ the knife