of converting you, and that night Paul had dreamt he was running for dear life down an endless corridor pursued by priests in black robes who were breathing hard and trying to lasso him with objects like bicycle tyres. He had stumbled and wakened just in time, but hadn't dared go to Aunt Verona's door and ask her to let him crawl into her bed, for he was a big boy of seven.
Mr. Silva was continually throwing off remarks which were as unusual in their way as were the objects he whittled out of pieces of board. When the sap was running in the alders he could make better whistles and slingshots than Mark Laval. Mark was clever with his blunt fingers, but you couldn't be sure that his whistles would blow or that the bark wouldn't split, whereas Mr. Silva was infallible.
One day when Paul came in from school to practise, Mr. Silva was replacing the heavy lid of the piano; the piano à queue, as Aunt Verona had called it on one of their French-speaking days, and the phrase had made Paul giggle.
On a newly-tuned instrument old pieces revived, like wilting flowers when put into water, and Paul played with extra zest. Mr. Silva lingered in the room, and Paul guessed that Aunt Verona suffered him to remain because his ideas stimulated her, as did those of the tramps and gipsies. Paul shared her contempt for the general mentality of the village and her respect for the Portuguese Jack of all trades whom the village dismissed as "odd." He had asked Aunt Verona why Mr. Silva was contented to do chores for a living rather than return to Oporto where there were palm trees or go to Halifax where there were hundreds of pianos to tune, but it had been difficult to get all his questions formulated in German, which Aunt Verona made him speak on Mondays and
