HEART OF THE CITY
the tortured mouth, the small chin fairly worn and burrowed away against his vibrant instrument. And the music that burst suddenly forth was like scalding water poured on ice seething with an- guish, shuddering with ecstasy, flame at your heart, frost at your spine.
The Girl began to shiver. "Oh, yes, I know," she whispered. "He plays, of course, as though he knew all sorrows by their first names, but that's Genius, is n't it, not Romance ? He s such a little lad. He can hardly have experienced much really truly emotion as yet beyond a stomach ache or the loss of a Henty book."
"A stomach ache! A Henty book!" cried the Journalist, with a bitter, convulsive sort of mirth. "Well, I'm ready to admit that the boy is scarcely eighteen. But he happens to have lost a wife and a son within the past two months ! While some of us country-born fellows of twenty-eight or thirty were asking our patient girls at home to wait even another year, while we came over to New York and tried our fortunes, this little youngster of scarcely eighteen is already a husband, a father, and a widower.
" He's a Russian Jew you can see that
and one of our big music people picked him up
jabberingly to America. But the invitation did n't
over there a few months ago and brought him
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