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were devil’s tunes in his repertory. “He could no more play the ‘Wold Hundredth ’ to his true time than he could play the brazen serpent,” the tranter would say. (The brazen serpent was supposed in Mellstock to be a musical inetrament particularly hard to blow.)

Occasionally Mop could prodnee the aforesaid moving effect upon the souls of grown-up persons, especially young women of fragile and responsive organization. Such a one was Car’line Aspent. Though she was already engaged to be married before she met him, Car’line, of them all, waa the most influenced by Mop Ollamoor’s heart-stealing melodies, to her discomfort, nay, positive pain and ultimate injury. She Was a pretty, invocating, weak-mouthed girl, whose chief defect as a companion with her sex was a tendency to peevishness now and then. At this time she was not a resident in Mellstock parish, where Mop lodged, but lived some miles off at Stickleford, farther down the river,

How and where she first made acquaintance with him and his fiddling is not truly known, but the story was that it either began or was developed on one spring evening, when, in passing through Lower Mellstock, she chanced to pause on the bridge near his house to rest herself, and languidly leaned over the parapet. Mop was standing on his door-step, as was his custom, spinning the insidious thread of semi- and demi-semi-quavers from the E string of his fiddle for the benefit of passers-by, and laughing as the tears rolled down the cheeks of the little children hanging around him, Car’line pretended to be engrossed with the rippling of the stream under the arches, bat in reality she was listening, as he knew, Presently the aching of the heart seized ber simultaneously with a wild desire to plide airily in the mazes of an infinite dance. To shake off the fascination she resolved to go