"The fiddle, the fiddle!" shouted Mr. Mylrea. "I always had my doubts about the music that's in it, and now I see there's none at all."
Jemmy took himself off, carrying his fiddle very tenderly in both hands. He was all but stone deaf, poor fellow, and had never yet known the full enjoyment of his own music. That's why he was so liberal of it with people more happily endowed.
A big blustering fellow then dashed into the parlor without ceremony.
"Balladhoo," he shouted, in a voice that rang through the house, "why don't you have the life of that howling demon? Here, take my clasp-knife at it and silence it forever."
"It's gone to the barn," said Mylrea Balladhoo, quietly, in reply to these bloodthirsty proposals.
The newcomer, Kerruish Kinvig, was a prosperous net-maker in Peel, and a thorn in the side of every public official within a radius of miles. The joy of his life was to have a delightful row with a magistrate, a coroner, a commissioner, or perhaps a parson by preference. When there was never a public meeting to be interrupted, never a "vestry" to be broken up, Kerruish Kinvig became as flat and stale as an old dog, and was forced to come up and visit his friend Mylrea Balladhoo, just by way of keeping his hand in.
On the present occasion he had scarcely seated himself, when he leaped up, rushed to the window, peered into the night, and shouted that the light on the harbor pier was out once more. He declared that this was the third time within a month; prophesied endless catastro-
