“You mustn’t put it inside your lips,” corrected Jinny. “Think you’re tum-tumming into a comb.”
He readjusted it sullenly, but the music within was still coy.
“Slacken your lip,” she advised. “Try to splutter br-r-r-rr into it.”
But whatever he spluttered into it, nothing came out.
“I never realized it was quite so difficult, even the lipping,” said Jinny simply. “Of course I didn’t expect you to do the double or treble tonguing at once.”
“What do you mean, tonguing?” he inquired morosely.
“Dividing the notes. Say ‘Tucker, Tucker, Tucker’ into it.”
“But it’s blowing, not saying,” said Will obstinately.
But secretly he modified his methods, and at last a ghostly plangency or a staccato squeak began to reward his apoplectic agonizings, and the still prisoned Nip, who had been yawning in utter boredom, now accompanied the music with a critical and lugubrious howling.
Upon this spectacle and situation reissued the guileless Caleb, and had the Crystal City itself come down upon earth, his eyes could scarcely have orbed themselves more spaciously.
“He _didn’t_ summon you,” observed the merciless Jinny.
“Go away, father! What are you staring at?” yapped the tortured young man.
“You do be a fine musicianer!” And Caleb grinned. “But do ye don’t play now—mother’s gittin’ into her tantarums over your tea.”
“The instrument must be out of order,” said Will, handing it up crossly to Jinny. Remorselessly she drew from it a clarion call that made the welkin ring and the poultry-yard respond in kind.
“How the cocks crow!” she observed artlessly.
“Thinks because she blows a horn she’s a devil of a fellow,” Will remarked witheringly to his receding father. “Say, Jinny, why don’t you wear the breeches?”
“Like those Bloomerites you told me of? I will,” she responded sweetly, “if you think it more becoming.”
“Me! You don’t suppose _I_ notice what you wear.”
“Then how do you know I’m not wearing ’em now?”
“You have me there!” And he smiled despite himself. The smile lit up the face under the aureole of red hair—it seemed to Jinny a sudden glimpse, through a rift of Time, of the boy she had known. “All the same,” he protested, “if I _had_ a horn, I could learn it in an hour.”
“Where can I get one?” he retorted fretfully.