Whether this follows from the same cause as attracts the children to flatten their noses on the windows and calls them to the curb that they put their ears close upon the racket that no sweetest sound be lost, is a deep question and not to be lightly answered. In the sound there is promise of the days to come when circuses will be loosed upon the land and elephants will go padding by--with eyes looking around for peanuts. Why this biggest of all beasts, this creature that looms above you like a crustaceous dinosaur--to use long words without squinting too closely on their meaning--why this behemoth with the swishing trunk, should eat peanuts, contemptible peanuts, lies so deep in nature that the mind turns dizzy. It is small stuff to feed valor on--a penny's worth of food in such a mighty hulk. Whatever the lion eats may turn to lion, but the elephant strains the proverb. He might swallow you instead, breeches, hat and suspenders--if you be of the older school of dress before the belt came in--and not so much as cough upon the buttons. And there will be red and yellow wagons, boarded up seductively, as though they could show you, if they would, snakes and hyenas. May be it is best, you think--such things lying in the seeds of time--to lay aside a dime from the budget of the week, for one can never be sure against the carelessness of parents, and their jaded appetites.
But the hurdy-gurdy is the call to sterner business also. I know an old lady who, at the first tinkle from the street, will take off her glasses with a finality as though she were never to use them again for the light pleasure of reading, but intended to fill the remainder of her days with deeper purpose. There is a piece of two-legged villainy in her employ by the name of William, and even before the changing of the tune, she will have him rolling up the rugs for the spring cleaning. There is a sour rhythm in the fellow and he will beat a pretty syncopation on them if the hurdy-gurdy will but stick to marching time. It is said that he once broke the fabric of a Kermanshah in his zeal at some crescendo of the _Robert E. Lee_. But he was lost upon the valse and struck languidly and out of time.
But maybe, Reader, in your youth you have heated a penny above a lamp, and with treacherous smile you have come before an open window. And when the son of Italy has grinned and beckoned for your bounty--the penny being just short of a molten state--you have thrown it to him. He stoops, he feels.... You have learned by this how much more blessed it is to give than to receive. Or, to dig deep in the riot of your youth, you have leased a hurdy-gurdy for a dollar and with other devils of your kind gone forth to seek your fortune. It's in noisier fashion than when Goldsmith played the flute through France for board and bed. If you turned the handle slowly and fast by jerks you attained a rare tempo that drew attention from even the most stolid windows. But as music it was as naught.