The tumult of the audience did not cease even with the retirement of Sweeney, and cries of “Hedrick!  Hedrick!” only subsided with the Professor’s high-keyed announcement that the subject was even then endeavoring to make himself heard, but could not until utter quiet was restored, adding the further appeal that the young man had already been a long time under the mesmeric spell, and ought not be so detained for an unnecessary period.  “See,” he concluded, with an assuring wave of the hand toward the subject, “see; he is about to address you.  Now, quiet!—­utter quiet, if you please!”

“Great heavens!” exclaimed my friend, stiflingly; “Just look at the boy!  Get onto that position for a poet!  Even Sweeney has fled from the sight of him!”

And truly, too, it was a grotesque pose the young man had assumed; not wholly ridiculous either, since the dwarfed position he had settled into seemed more a genuine physical condition than an affected one.  The head, back-tilted, and sunk between the shoulders, looked abnormally large, while the features of the face appeared peculiarly child-like—­especially the eyes—­wakeful and wide apart, and very bright, yet very mild and very artless; and the drawn and cramped outline of the legs and feet, and of the arms and hands, even to the shrunken, slender-looking fingers, all combined to most strikingly convey to the pained senses the fragile frame and pixey figure of some pitiably afflicted child, unconscious altogether of the pathos of its own deformity.

“Now, mark the kuss, Horatio!” gasped my friend.

At first the speaker’s voice came very low, and somewhat piping, too, and broken—­an eerie sort of voice it was, of brittle and erratic timbre and undulant inflection.  Yet it was beautiful.  It had the ring of childhood in it, though the ring was not pure golden, and at times fell echoless.  The spirit of its utterance was always clear and pure and crisp and cheery as the twitter of a bird, and yet forever ran an undercadence through it like a low-pleading prayer.  Half garrulously, and like a shallow brook might brawl across a shelvy bottom, the rhythmic little changeling thus began: 

  “I’m thist a little crippled boy, an’ never goin’ to grow
  An’ git a great big man at all!—­’cause Aunty told me so. 
  When I was thist a baby one’t I falled out of the bed
  An’ got ’The Curv’ture of the Spine’—­’at’s what the Doctor said. 
  I never had no Mother nen—­far my Pa run away
  An’ dassn’t come back here no more—­’cause he was drunk one day
  An’ stobbed a man in thish-ere town, an’ couldn’t pay his fine! 
  An’ nen my Ma she died—­an’ I got ‘Curv’ture of the Spine!’”

A few titterings from the younger people in the audience marked the opening stanza, while a certain restlessness, and a changing to more attentive positions seemed the general tendency.  The old Professor, in the meantime, had sunk into one of the empty chairs.  The speaker went on with more gaiety: