He was sitting there this afternoon -- a little old man , sadly twisted with rheumatism ; his head was abnormally large , thatched with long , wiry black hair ; his face was heavily lined and swarthily sunburned ; his eyes were deep-set and black , with occasional peculiar golden flashes in them . A strange looking man was old Abel Blair ; and as strange was he as he looked . Lower Carmody people would have told you . Old Abel was almost always sober in these , his later years . He was sober to-day . He liked to bask in that ripe sunlight as well as his dog and cat did ; and in such baskings he almost always looked out of his doorway at the far , fine blue sky over the tops of the crowding maples . But to-day he was not looking at the sky , instead , he was staring at the black , dusty rafters of his kitchen , where hung dried meats and strings of onions and bunches of herbs and fishing tackle and guns and skins . But old Abel saw not these things ; his face was the face of a man who beholds visions , compact of heavenly pleasure and hellish pain , for old Abel was seeing what he might have been -- and what he was ; as he always saw when Felix Moore played to him on the violin . And the awful joy of dreaming that he was young again , with unspoiled life before him , was so great and compelling that it counterbalanced the agony in the realization of a dishonoured old age , following years in which he had squandered the wealth of his soul in ways where Wisdom lifted not her voice . Felix Moore was standing opposite to him , before an untidy stove , where the noon fire had died down into pallid , scattered ashes . Under his chin he held old Abel 's brown , battered fiddle ; his eyes , too , were fixed on the ceiling ; and he , too , saw things not lawful to be uttered in any language save that of music ; and of all music , only that given forth by the anguished , enraptured spirit of the violin . And yet this Felix was little more than twelve years old , and his face was still the face of a child who knows nothing of either sorrow or sin or failure or remorse . Only in his large , gray-black eyes was there something not of the child -- something that spoke of an inheritance from many hearts , now ashes , which had aforetime grieved and joyed , and struggled and failed , and succeeded and grovelled . The inarticulate cries of their longings had passed into this child 's soul , and transmuted themselves into the expression of his music . Felix was a beautiful child . Carmody people , who stayed at home , thought so ; and old Abel Blair , who had roamed afar in many lands , thought so ; and even the Rev. Stephen Leonard , who taught , and tried to believe , that favour is deceitful and beauty is vain , thought so . He was a slight lad , with sloping shoulders , a slim brown neck , and a head set on it with stag-like grace and uplift . His hair , cut straight across his brow and falling over his ears , after some caprice of Janet Andrews , the minister 's housekeeper , was a glossy blue-black . The skin of his face and hands was like ivory ; his eyes were large and beautifully tinted -- gray , with dilating pupils ; his features had the outlines of a cameo . Carmody mothers considered him delicate , and had long foretold that the minister would never bring him up ; but old Abel pulled his grizzled moustache when he heard such forebodings and smiled .
`` Felix XXXXX will live , '' he said positively .
Abel Felix Leonard Moore baskings fire forebodings foretold old years