“I don’t feel like it, but I’d better go,” the old man said.  “Something amiss is in the air.  Damme, I’ve got all delicate to the saddle since you came, sir....  I used to think nothing of the ride down town—­and now it’s a carriage....  Ah, well, you can try out a new symphony—­and tell me what it says when I get back.”

As it turned out, Bedient did exactly this thing....  Time could not efface the humor evoked by the sight or sound of the magnificent orchestrelle.  During one of the Captain’s New York trips, he had heard a famous orchestra.  The effect upon him was of something superhuman.  The Captain went again—­followed the musicians to Boston and Philadelphia.  The result was more or less the same.  Soul flew in one direction; mind in another; and, inert before the players—­a little fat man, perspiring, weeping, ecstatic.  What came of it, he had told Bedient in this way: 

“The Hatteras was to sail at night-fall, but on that morning I went into a music-store, not knowing what I wanted exactly,—­but a souvenir of some kind, a book about orchestras.  It appears, I told a man there how I’d been philanderin’ with the musicians; how I had caught them in an off day at Springfield, Mass., and bought cornucopias of Pilsner until they would have broken down and wept had they not been near their instruments....  It was a big music-store, and he was a very good man.  He sold me the orchestrelle that morning.  You think I had an electric plant installed down here to light the house and drive my sugar-mill, don’t you?  It wasn’t that at all, but to run the big music-box yonder.  The man had smoothly attached a current, but he said I could just as well pump it with my feet.  Then he called in a church organist—­to drive the stops.  Between them, they got me where I was all run down from that orchestra crowd.  They said a child could learn the stops....  You should have heard my friends on the Hatteras—­when the orchestrelle was put aboard that afternoon.  They never forget that.  Then we had a triple ox-cart made down in Coral City, and four span were goaded up the trail—­and there she stands.

“Andrew, they finally left me alone with it and a couple of hundred music-rolls....  It was hours after, that I came forth a sick man to cable for power....  About those music-rolls—­I had called for the best.  One does that blind, you know.  But the best in music matters, it appears, has nothing to do with retired sea-captains....  It’s a pretty piece of furniture.  The orchestra had died out of me by the time we had the electric-plant going....  I take it you have to be caught young to deal with those stops....  You go after it, Andrew.  It scares me and the natives when it begins to pipe up.  I had a time getting my household back that first time.  Maybe, I didn’t touch the right button—­or I touched too many.  You go after it, my boy—­it’s all there—­appassionato—­oboe—­’consharto’—­vox humana and the whole system—­”