And he sat down implacably in the doorway.

The serious poetry of all languages has omitted the little brother; and yet he is one of the great trials of love—­the immemorial burden of courtship.  Tragedy should have found place for him, but he has been left to the haphazard vignettist of Grub Street.  He is the grave and real menace of lovers; his head is sacred and terrible, his power illimitable.  There is one way—­only one—­to deal with him; but Robert Williams, having a brother of Penrod’s age, understood that way.

Robert had one dollar in the world.  He gave it to Penrod immediately.

Enslaved forever, the new Rockefeller rose and went forth upon the highway, an overflowing heart bursting the floodgates of song.

     “In her eyes the light of love was soffly gleamun’,
     So sweetlay,
     So neatlay. 
     On the banks the moon’s soff light was brightly streamun’,
     Words of love I then spoke to her. 
     She was purest of the Pew-er: 
     ’Littil sweetheart, do not sigh,
     Do not weep and do not cry. 
     I will build a littil cottige just for yew-EW-EW and I.’”

In fairness, it must be called to mind that boys older than Penrod have these wellings of pent melody; a wife can never tell when she is to undergo a musical morning, and even the golden wedding brings her no security, a man of ninety is liable to bust-loose in song, any time.

Invalids murmured pitifully as Penrod came within hearing; and people trying to think cursed the day that they were born, when he went shrilling by.  His hands in his pockets, his shining face uplifted to the sky of June, he passed down the street, singing his way into the heart’s deepest hatred of all who heard him.

     “One evuning I was sturow-ling
     Midst the city of the dead,
     I viewed where all a-round me
     Their peace-full graves was spread. 
     But that which touched me mostlay——­”

He had reached his journey’s end, a junk-dealer’s shop wherein lay the long-desired treasure of his soul—­an accordion which might have possessed a high quality of interest for an antiquarian, being unquestionably a ruin, beautiful in decay, and quite beyond the sacrilegious reach of the restorer.  But it was still able to disgorge sounds—­loud, strange, compelling sounds, which could be heard for a remarkable distance in all directions; and it had one rich calf-like tone that had gone to Penrod’s heart.  He obtained the instrument for twenty-two cents, a price long since agreed upon with the junk-dealer, who falsely claimed a loss of profit, Shylock that he was!  He had found the wreck in an alley.

With this purchase suspended from his shoulder by a faded green cord, Penrod set out in a somewhat homeward direction, but not by the route he had just travelled, though his motive for the change was not humanitarian.  It was his desire to display himself thus troubadouring to the gaze of Marjorie Jones.  Heralding his advance by continuous experiments in the music of the future, he pranced upon his blithesome way, the faithful Duke at his heels. (It was easier for Duke than it would have been for a younger dog, because, with advancing age, he had begun to grow a little deaf.)