text:  "Whether this statement were really true or whether a mere imagination came never to be rightly known; and it is most likely that nothing more would have been said about it if on the following morning the report had not run like a fire through the village that the Dwarf-piper in the night had come to an untimely end and was then lying as dead as mutton on Twirling-stick Mike's farm and field with his fiddle jammed under his broad chin and the bow still resting on the strings