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A jews-harp's plenty good enough for a rat. All animals like music in a prison they dote on it. Specially, painful music; and you can't get no other kind out of a jews-harp. It always interests them; they come out to see what's the matter with you. Yes, you're all right; you're fixed very well.
"Not if I could play any better instrument such as the violin, or the concertina; though I should in any case avoid the piano, for fear of flattening the ends of my fingers. Still, the jews-harp is a jews-harp; and this is the very best I could find in the market. Humble as it looks, and humble as it undeniably is, it has sounded in every nook and corner of Riverina.
A fiddle wrought this, or rather genius, in whose hand a jews-harp is the lyre of Orpheus, a fiddle the harp of David, a chisel a hewer of heroic forms, a brush or a pen the scepter of souls, and, alas! a nail a picklock. Inside every fiddle is a soul, but a coy one. The nine hundred and ninety-nine never win it.
There are some of my readers who will remember the old chemical chimney in Roxbury, and what strange sounds were heard there when the boys stood below, laughing and talking. What I now heard recalled most vividly all those experiences. To soothe my mind a little, I then took a jews-harp from my pocket and played the "Star-spangled Banner."
Him I never lay down without feeling my appreciation increased for lesser men never without the same kind of comfort that one returning from the presence feels when he doffs respectful attitude and dress of ceremony, and subsides into old coat, familiar arm-chair, and slippers. After long-continued organ-music, the jangle of the jews-harp is felt as an exquisite relief.
It was getting more suggestive than interpenetrating, and he thought he might talk the matter over better with Olive. Just then a little boy came in, and bargained with Gifted for a Jews-harp, which, having obtained, he placed against his teeth, and began playing upon it with a pleasure almost equal to that of the young poet reciting his own verses.
That the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime, than the twingle twangle of a Jews-harp; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that from something innate and independent of all associations of ideas;-these I had set down as irrefragable, orthodox truths, until perusing your book shook my faith.
We think greatness entailed or organized in some places or duties, in certain offices or occasions, and do not see that Paganini can extract rapture from a catgut, and Eulenstein from a jews-harp, and a nimble-fingered lad out of shreds of paper with his scissors, and Landseer out of swine, and the hero out of the pitiful habitation and company in which he was hidden.
When father had that typhoid and could not sleep dear father! in his normal condition he sleeps like a bag of corn-meal who was there in all the house to keep those boys quiet? Nobody but me. When they organized a military company in our back yard directly under father's windows two drums, a fish-horn, a jews-harp, a fife, and three tin pans was there anybody but me to put a stop to it?
They delighted much in an instrument made from some part of the iju palm-tree, which resembled and produced a sound like the jews-harp. The potato, which was introduced there many years ago, is now a common article of food, and cultivated with some attention. Excellent tobacco is grown there, also cotton and indigo, the small leafed kind.