"
Standing by the gray boulder, with her face up turned to the mountains,
she placed the instrument under her chin and drew the bow softly across
the strings.
For an hour or more she played. Then, as Czar trotted sedately into the
glade, she lowered her instrument and, with a smile, called merrily to
Conrad Lagrange who, attracted by the music, was standing at the gate on
the bank--from the artist's position invisible; "Come down, good
genie,--come down! You have been watching there quite long enough. Come,
instantly; or with my magic I'll turn you into a fantastic, dancing bug,
such as those that straddle there upon the waters of the spring, or else
into a fat pollywog that wiggles in the black ooze among the dead leaves
and rotting bits of wood."
With a quick movement, she tucked her violin under her chin and played a
few measures of the worst sort of ragtime, in perfect imitation of a
popular performer. The effect, following the music she had just been
making, was grotesque and horrible.
"Mercy, mercy!" cried the man at the gate. "I beg! I beg! Do not, I pray,
good nymph, torture me with thy dreadful power. I swear that I will obey
thy every wish and whim."
Pointing with her bow--as with a wand--to the boulder, she sternly
commanded, "Come, then, and sit here upon this rock; and give to me an
account of all that thou hast done since I left thee in the rose garden or
I will split thy ears and stretch thy soul upon a torture rack of hideous
noise.
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