resembles a young child, which, when it has been washed and fed and has slept and has been washed and fed once more, becomes something adorable and entirely different from the curse of yesterday's railway travel.
The harp-case has power to turn smiling, kindly, bearded men into brutal Grobians. They fetch out the trunks with a jest; whistling, load their barrows with sausages and telescopic baskets. "Anything more, sir?" they ask alertly. "There is only," I reply, with my forced smile, "a harp." And the weather changes for the worse. Two, three, four of them bend their enormous muscles to the toil. I see their honest faces redden, grow purple. I hear muttered words which I recognise as popular expressions of hate. While elevating their outrageous fardel to the roof of our conveyance they give themselves permanent strains. They rupture their abdominal walls. They become out-patients at infirmaries and bind themselves in trusses. They lose their situations. Their children starve. Their sticks are sold up. At least, I imagine all these things happening.
And to change these sour-faced, fainting, loathing, blasphemous enemies back into friends, what sums are needful!
I do not mind the loss of money—the harp is ready for the road—but the thought of these
