Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/303

Rh new, smelling horribly of varnish, and not much more musical than a jew's-harp; it was yet beautiful beyond words to the two lonely women who had worked so many years to buy it. In Mrs. Bennet's early youth she had made some pretense of being a piano-player, and she thought that she could now recall enough of her old knowledge to give Tilly the elementary instructions; but she was sadly disappointed; the working of the pedals was a hopeless mystery to her, and the action of the keys, so unlike that of piano-keys, threw her all "out," as she said. "I never mistrusted 't was so different from a piano," she cried. "It 's worse 'n a sewing-machine."

There was nothing to be done now but to let the child go to Provincetown to be taught. Luckily the purchase of the melodeon had not exhausted the treasury of the crochet money. There was enough left to give Tilly a winter's schooling in Provincetown; and if she spent more time over her melodeon than over her arithmetic, and tried all her teachers by her indifference to books, it was only a filial carrying out of the instructions of her mother, whose last words to her had been: "Now, learn all you can, Tilly. It 's the only chance you 'll get; but don't let anything hinder your learning to play the melodeon."

How long the lonely winter seemed to Mrs. Bennet, nobody, not even her husband, knew. For days at a time all communication between the