"Go on with your bidding," he said.
He was going to buy the thing which had belonged to his daughter, was
beloved by her--the living oracle of the morning, the muezzin of his
mosque of home. It had been to the girl who had gone as another such a
bird had been to the mother of the girl, the voice that sang, "Praise
God," in the short summer of that bygone happiness of his. Even this
cage and its homebird were not his; they belonged to the creditors.
"Go on. I buy--I bid," Jean Jacques said in a voice that rang. It had
no blur of emotion. It had resonance. The hammer that struck the bell
of his voice was the hammer of memory, and if it was plaintive it also
was clear, and it was also vibrant with the silver of lost hopes.
M. Manotel humoured him, while the bird still sang. "Four dollars--five
dollars: do I hear no more than five dollars?--going once, going twice,
going three times--gone!" he cried, for no one had made a further bid;
and indeed M. Manotel would not have heard another voice than Jean
Jacques' if it had been as loud as the falls of the Saguenay. He was a
kind of poet in his way, was M. Manotel. He had been married four times,
and he would be married again if he had the chance; also he wrote verses
for tombstones in the churchyard at St.
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