"I'm afraid I would, Tom," replied David, with a voice full of anguish.
"But just listen to me," said Tom; and taking up the violin, he rendered the opening passage of "O Thou Fount of every Blessing!" Scarcely had he finished when a customer entered the shop, and he hurried to the front, leaving the violin and the bow on the chair that he had quitted.
No sooner was he gone than the little figure slipped noiselessly from its perch, and hobbling quickly to the chair on which the violin lay, stood beside it in silent love. Touch it he durst not; but his sensitive, delicate hands passed tremblingly over it, and his eyes dwelt upon it with unspeakable longing. Then, with a sigh, he turned away, and hastened to the front of the shop. Tom had already dismissed his customer, and was standing in the door, looking down the street in the direction of the Kentucky Hotel, where a small crowd had collected around the entrance of the museum.
As David stepped out upon the sidewalk, it was the sight of this crowd that recalled him to a new sorrow.
"Tom," he cried, with longing, "are you going to see the wax figures?"
"Of course I'm going," he replied, carelessly. "We're all going."
"When, Tom?" asked David, with breathless interest.
"Whenever we want to, of course," replied Tom. "I'm not going just once; I'm going as often as I like."
"Why don't you go now, Tom? It's so hot--they might melt."
This startling view of the case was not without its effect on Tom, although a suggestion from such a source was not to be respected. He merely threw his eyes up towards the heavens and said, sturdily: "You ninny! they'll not melt. Don't you see it's going to rain and turn cooler?"
"I'll bet you _I'd_ not wait for it to turn cooler. I'll bet you _I'd_ be in there before you could say Jack Roberson, if _I_ had a quarter," said David, with resolution.
All that long afternoon he hung in feverish excitement around the door of the museum. There was scarce a travelling show in Kentucky in those days. It was not strange if to this idler of the streets, in whom imagination was all-powerful, and in whose heart quivered ungovernable yearnings for the heroic, the poetic, and the beautiful, this day of the first exhibition of wax figures was the most memorable of his life.