He leaned against the wall with his ear laid over the edge, and as near the window as he dared to put it, his rough face, gnarled and blotched, and hirsute with the stubble of neglected beard--his whole ursine face transfigured by the passage of the sweet sounds through his chaotic brain, which they swept like the wind of God, when of old it moved on the face of the waters that clothed the void and formless world.
'Haud yer tongue!' he would say in a hoarse whisper, when Robert sought to attract his attention; 'haud yer tongue, man, and hearken.

Gin yon bonny leddy 'at yer grannie keeps lockit up i' the aumry war to tak to the piano, that's jist hoo she wad play.

Lord, man! pit yer sowl i' yer lugs, an' hearken.' The soutar was all wrong in this; for if old Mr.Falconer's violin had taken woman-shape, it would have been that of a slight, worn, swarthy creature, with wild black eyes, great and restless, a voice like a bird's, and thin fingers that clawed the music out of the wires like the quills of the old harpsichord; not that of Mary St.John, who was tall, and could not help being stately, was large and well-fashioned, as full of repose as Handel's music, with a contralto voice to make you weep, and eyes that would have seemed but for their maidenliness to be always ready to fold you in their lucid gray depths.
Robert stared at the soutar, doubting at first whether he had not been drinking.

But the intoxication of music produces such a different expression from that of drink, that Robert saw at once that if he had indeed been drinking, at least the music had got above the drink.

As long as the playing went on, Elshender was not to be moved from the window.
But to many of the people of Rothieden the music did not recommend the musician; for every sort of music, except the most unmusical of psalm-singing, was in their minds of a piece with 'dancin' an' play-actin', an' ither warldly vainities an' abominations.' And Robert, being as yet more capable of melody than harmony, grudged to lose a lesson on Sandy's 'auld wife o' a fiddle' for any amount of Miss St.
John's playing..