The sunshine fell over Sylvia 's chestnut hair like a crown of glory and youth . `` I do feel so perfectly happy , '' said the Old Lady , with a long , rapturous breath . III . Each In His Own Tongue The honey-tinted autumn sunshine was falling thickly over the crimson and amber maples around old Abel Blair 's door . There was only one outer door in old Abel 's house , and it almost always stood wide open . A little black dog , with one ear missing and a lame forepaw , almost always slept on the worn red sandstone slab which served old Abel for a doorstep ; and on the still more worn sill above it a large gray cat almost always slept . Just inside the door , on a bandy-legged chair of elder days , old Abel almost always sat . 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 XXXXX the expression of his music .
In above as at before by inside into of that