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This morning I walked on the Veld, and met a young black shepherd leading his sheep and goats, and playing on a guitar composed of an old tin mug covered with a bit of sheepskin and a handle of rough wood, with pegs, and three strings of sheep-gut.

To Leon Kantor, by who knows what symphonic scheme of things, life was a chromatic scale, yielding up to him through throbbing, living nerves of sheep-gut, the sheerest semitones of man's emotions.

He cut to measure stalks of reed, and fixed them in through holes bored in the stony shell of the tortoise, and cunningly stretched round it the hide of an ox, and put in the horns of the lyre, and to both he fitted the bridge, and stretched seven harmonious chords of sheep-gut.

Meantime wise Ulysses, when he had handled the great bow and scanned it closely, even as one well skilled to play the lyre and sing stretches with ease round its new peg a string, securing at each end the twisted sheep-gut, so without effort did Ulysses string the mighty bow. Holding it now with his right hand, he tried its cord; and clear to the touch it sang, voiced like the swallow.

To Leon Kantor, by who knows what symphonic scheme of things, life was a chromatic scale, yielding up to him, through throbbing, living nerves of sheep-gut, the sheerest semitones of man's emotions. When he tucked his Stradivarius beneath his chin the book of life seemed suddenly translated to him in melody.

So spake the wooers, but Odysseus of many counsels had lifted the great bow and viewed it on every side, and even as when a man that is skilled in the lyre and in minstrelsy, easily stretches a cord about a new peg, after tying at either end the twisted sheep-gut, even so Odysseus straightway bent the great bow, all without effort, and took it in his right hand and proved the bow-string, which rang sweetly at the touch, in tone like a swallow.

The eagle's feathers done and set among feathers of wings of other birds corrupteth and fretteth them. As strings made of wolf-gut done and put into a lute or in an harp among strings made of sheep-gut do destroy, and fret, and corrupt the strings made of sheep-gut, if it so be that they be set among them, as in a lute or in an harp, as Pliny saith.