"
A few minutes' walk brought the parties on the broad galleries of the
house that contained the object of so much curiosity. The doors and
windows were closed, and a suspicious look was on everything.
"Do they always keep a house closed up this way that has a piano in it?"
asked Cash mysteriously.
"Certainly," replied Mercer: "the damp would destroy its tones."
Repeated knocks at the doors, and finally at the windows, satisfied both
Cash and Mercer that nobody was at home. In the midst of their
disappointment, Cash discovered a singular machine at the end of the
gallery, crossed by bars and rollers and surmounted with an enormous
crank. Cash approached it on tiptoe; he had a presentiment that he
beheld the object of his curiosity, and, as its intricate character
unfolded itself, he gazed with distended eyes, and asked Mercer, with
breathless anxiety, what that strange and incomprehensible box was.
Mercer turned to the thing as coolly as a north wind to an icicle, and
said, that was _it_.
"That _it_!" exclaimed Cash, opening his eyes still wider; and then,
recovering himself, he asked to see "the tone."
Mercer pointed to the cross-bars and rollers. With trembling hands, with
a resolution that would enable a man to be scalped without winking,
Cash reached out his hand and seized the handle of the crank (Cash, at
heart, was a brave and fearless man).
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