“Stuff!  Cadging for chow, does one acquire merit?” retorted Heywood, over his shoulder.  “You talk like a bonze, Wutz.”  He winked.  “I’d rather hear the sing-song box.”

“Ach so, I forget!” Still whimpering, Wutzler dragged something from a corner, squatted, and jerked at a crank, with a noise of ratchets.  “She blay not so moch now,” he snuffled.  “Captain Kneepone he has gifen her, when she iss all op inside for him.  I haf rebaired, but she blay only one song yet.  A man does not know, Herr Hackh, what he may be.  Once I haf piano, and viola my own, yes, and now haf I diss small, laffing, sick teufel!” He rose, and faced Heywood with a trembling, passionate gesture.  “But diss yong man, he stand by der oldt fellow!” The streaming eyes blinked absurdly.

Behind him, with a whirring sound, a metallic voice assailed them in a gabble of words, at first husky and broken, then clear, nasal, a voice from neither Europe nor Asia, but America:—­

“Then did I laff? 
Ooh, aha-ha ha ha,
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! 
I could not help but laffing,
Ooh, aha-ha ...”

From a throat of tin, it mocked them insanely with squealing, black-hearted guffaws.  Heywood sat smoking, with the countenance of a stoic; but when the laughter in the box was silent, he started abruptly.

“We’re off, old chap,” he announced.  “Bedtime.  Just came to see you were all up-standing.  Tough as ever?  Good!  Don’t let—­er—­anything carry you off.”

At the gate, Wutzler held aloft his glow-worm lantern.

“Dose fellows catch me?” he mumbled, “Der plagues—­dey will forget me.  All zo many shoots, kugel, der bullet,—­’gilt’s mir, oder gilt es dir?’ Men are dead in der Silk-Weafer Street.  Dey haf hong up nets, and dorns, to keep out der plague’s-goblins off deir house.  Listen, now, dey beat gongs!—­But we are white men.  You—­you tell me zo, to-night!” He blubbered something incoherent, but as the gate slammed they heard the name of God, in a broken benediction.

They had groped out of the cleft, and into a main corridor, before Heywood paused.

“That devil in the box!” He shook himself like a spaniel.  “Queer it should get into me so.  But I hate being laughed at by—­anybody.”

A confused thunder of gongs, the clash of cymbals smothered in the distance, maintained a throbbing uproar, pierced now and then by savage yells, prolonged and melancholy.  As the two wanderers listened,—­

“Where’s the comfort,” said Heywood, gloomily, “of knowing somebody’s worse off?—­No, I wasn’t thinking of Wutzler, then.  Talk of germs! why, over there, it’s goblins they’re scaring away.  Think, behind their nets and thorns, what wretches—­women, too, and kids—­may be crouched down, quaking, sick with terror.  Humph!—­I don’t mind saying”—­for a moment his hand lay on Rudolph’s shoulder—­“that I loathe giving this muck-hole the satisfaction—­I’d hate to go Out here, that’s all.”