Sometimes he left his work for a moment, and raising his eyes and his hands declaimed in tones which were very tragic,—
"Ah, Eurydice! before thy beauty
I passed the rounds of success,
And the sentence of Delphi was undoubted,
That on earth I am the only one blest."
Then again in a hundred trills and cadences he sang,—
"O piano! piano!—Zitto! pia-ha-ha-no!"
Or similar creations of his own mind on a sudden,—
"And if thou fill a pipe, O Youth,
And pressing the bowl with thy finger, put fire on it."
"By Mohammed! If Yosef should come, this work would go on more quickly; but he is marrying Helena at present—Ei! and as innocence is dear to me, I would fix it this way! Dear Helena, permit And what farther? Oh, the farther the better—"
All at once some one pulled the bell.
Augustinovich turned toward the door and extending his hand intoned,—
"Road-weary traveller,
Cross thou my threshold."
The door opened; a man young and elegantly dressed entered the room.
