Tommy opened the door, peeped in, hesitated, looked into another car, came back, gave his little fiddle a shove on his shoulder, and walked in.

He sees his beloved fiddle, and his no less beloved feline friend, in loving conjunction; he bursts out rapturously with impetuous joy: "Hey! diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle!

There was the orchestra against the back-cloth, rendering selections from popular Pekin revues on the drum, cymbal and one-stringed fiddle.

Sometimes it would be a big book he'd lug home, and sometimes it would be a mikerscope, and sometimes it would be a dreadful old-lookin' fiddle that he'd picked up somewhere, and kept a-screechin' on, sayin' all the while that it was jest as smooth as a flute.

And, from the dull fatigue of thinking free, Hear the facetious fiddle's repartee: Our home-spun authors must forsake the field, And Shakspeare to the soft Scarletti yield.

Everywhere was gay soundthe fiddle, the laugh, the song; everywhere was gay colorthe red sashes of the voyageurs, the beaded moccasins and leggings of the metis, the capotes of the brigade, the variegated costumes of the Crees and Ojibways.

" A few small boys were gathered about him, and the tinker began to hum an Irish reel, fingers and forearm flying as he played an imaginary fiddle.

Of him there is a pretty fable, that once being sent to prison for debt, he won over the jailer's daughter, and she brought him stealthily wood and implements with which he made the so-called "prison fiddles," of whose curious shape Charles Reade said: "Such is the force of genius that I believe in our secret hearts we love these impudent fiddles best; they are so full of chic."

No one smiled, no one said anything; and the silence was unbroken save by an occasional rasping sound from an asthmatic fiddle in the orchestra, or a melancholy toot, toot, as one of the musicians tuned his comb.

"Now, Weston, out with the merry fiddle," said he, "an' see it give us happy thoughts.

Day and night the house echoed with new sounds; the very walls grew resonant; the entire building, buried away among these desolate hills, trembled as though he were imprisoned within the belly of some monstrous and gigantic fiddle.

But Lancelot had not as yet 'Galliolised,' as the Irish schoolmaster used to call it, and cared very little to play a political ninth fiddle.

And all the time he was keeping her trained as fine as the proverbial fiddle.

They do not all knock at area-doors for old clothes and broken victual, nor hold out hats at street-crossings, nor expose sharp-faced babies to win pity, nor send their infant tatterdemalions to torture the ears of the wealthy with scratchy fiddles and wheezing accordions.

The sharp fiddles are already beginning to squeak out a gay galop, and I am tapping impatient time with my foot to that brisk, emphasized music which has always seemed to Barbara and me exhilarating past the power of words to express.

Let him tak a spring on his ain fiddle.