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"We might adjourn and meet in an hour," suggested Sid. "That would give us more opportunity to invite other fellers in." How Charlie did admire Sid for his easy flow of language! The "lane," as Seamont called the narrow street before the barn, was now searched for recruits, and the barn-chamber was deserted a whole hour. The big horse-flies sawed on their bass-viols at their leisure.
The frogs in the creek were tuning their bass-viols. A tree-toad rattled on some unseen trunk, and the whole woods heaved its great lungs in the steady breathing which it never leaves off, but which becomes a roar and a wheeze in stormy or winter weather. "There isn't anything" began Grandma Padgett, but between thing and "here" came the distinct laugh of a child.
He paid no attention to her, and it was she who, of necessity, broke into speech. "Well! I've got no more to say. Do you mean to tell me you'd go off playin' on fiddles an' bass-viols, an' leave me, your own wife's sister, settin' here the whole evenin' long, all swelled up with the toothache?"
To such depths of rebellion were stirred the Puritan instincts of these religious souls. Many a minister said openly that he would like to walk out of his pulpit when the obnoxious and hated flutes, violins, bass-viols, and bassoons were played upon in the singing gallery. One clergyman contemptuously announced "We will now sing and fiddle the forty-fifth Psalm."
On the afternoon of every Sunday a large contingent of the Casterbridge journeymen steady churchgoers and sedate characters having attended service, filed from the church doors across the way to the Three Mariners Inn. The rear was usually brought up by the choir, with their bass-viols, fiddles, and flutes under their arms.
They were somewhat musical too, having a deep vibrating note which at times closely resembles the tuning of two or three bass-viols in an orchestra. In Malacca and Borneo I had heard no such sounds as these, which indicates that the frogs, like most of the animals of Celebes, are of species peculiar to it. My kind friend and landlord, Mr. Mesman, was a good specimen of the Macassar-born Dutchman.
In 1794 the church in Newbury obtained an organ, and many unpleasant and disparaging references were made by clergymen of other parishes to "our neighbor's box of whistles," "the tooting tub." Violoncellos, or bass-viols, as they were universally called, were almost the first musical instruments that were allowed in the New England churches.
'I had quite forgotten the old choir, with their fiddles and bass-viols, said the home-comer, musingly. 'Are they still going on the same as of old? 'Bless the man! said Christopher Twink, the master-thatcher; 'why, they've been done away with these twenty year.
To the dreamer it was no surprise that this unknown theatre of his dreams should be vast as the gladiatorial arena. And then came the deep thunderous music of innumerable bass-viols and bassoons: and some one told him it was the first night of a great tragedy.
Once he had been on guard in that village all night; now that past stood before him at once in a series of views. He is an Ulan again, and he stands there on guard; at a distance is the public-house; he looks with swimming eyes. There is thundering and singing and shouting amid the silence of the night with voices of fiddles and bass-viols "U-ha! U-ha!"
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