It was a place where birds sang
divinely, yet where obscene fowls of prey hovered in the blue or waited
by the dying denizens of the desert or the plain; where dark-eyed women
heard, with sidelong triumph, the whispers of passion; where sweet-faced
children fled in fear from terrors undefined; where harpies and
witch-women and evil souls waited in ambush; or scurried through the
coverts where men brought things to die; or where they fled for futile
refuge from armed foes. It was a world of unbridled will, this, where the
soul of Jethro Fawe had its origin; and to it his senses fled
involuntarily when he put Sarasate's fiddle to his chin this Autumn
evening.
From that well of the First Things--the first things of his own life, the
fount from which his forebears drew, backwards through the centuries,
Jethro Fawe quickly drank his fill; and then into the violin he poured
his own story--no improvisation, but musical legends and classic
fantasies and folk-breathings and histories of anguished or joyous haters
or lovers of life; treated by the impressionist who made that which had
been in other scenes to other men the thing of the present and for the
men who are. That which had happened by the Starzke River was now of the
Sagalac River.
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