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Except Injin Charley, Phil was the only man in that country who ever saw a beaver in the open daylight. At camp sometimes when all the men were away and his own work was done, he would crouch like a raccoon in the far corner of his deep square bunk with the board ends that made of it a sort of little cabin, and play to himself softly on his violin. No one ever heard him.
Ludo was learning to play on the piano, but I had chosen another instrument. Among our best friends, the three fine sons of Privy-Councillor Oesterreich and others, there was a pleasant boy named Victor Rubens, whose parents were likewise friends of my mother. In the hospitable house of this agreeable family I had heard the composer Vieuxtemps play the violin when I was nine years old.
It was a glass pin-tray, decorated beneath with labels from the Herr Professor's cigars and in the center a picture of the Emperor. The response came in this wise. Harmony struggling home against an east wind and holding the pin-tray and her violin case, opened the old garden gate by the simple expedient of leaning against it.
More pupils followed young girls and old ones, and a youth with a violin that fluttered and wailed and grew harmonious at last as the youth forgot himself. Uncle William's big, round face beamed upon him. Sergia, watching him from behind the scenes, could see that he regarded them all as nice children. He would have looked the same had they played on jews'-harps and tin horns.
Her anxious gentleness made him laugh, but it seemed to him perfectly beautiful. Then he went on about Mrs. Newbolt: "Of course she couldn't understand you! You might as well expect a high-tempered cow to understand a violin solo." "How mad she'd be to be called a cow! Oh, Maurice, do you suppose she's got my letter by this time? I left it on her bureau. She'll rage!" "Let her rage.
When he played on his violin, it was as if the miracle of its fashioning were again enacted; as if the bird on the quivering bough, the mellow sunshine streaming through the lattice of green leaves, the tinkle of the woodland stream, spoke in every tone; and more than this, the hearth-glow in whose light the patient hands had worked, the breath of the soul bending itself in passionate prayer for perfection, these, too, seemed to have wrought their blessed influence on the willing strings until the tone was laden with spiritual harmony.
People recalled everything he had said and done since coming to the place. His wrestling powers were freely commented upon, as well as his ability to play the violin. They remembered, too, how he had faced Ben Stubbles at the dance, and had defeated single-handed the men sent to waylay him along the road at night.
Everybody around him was obliged to be musical; and if one was not so, it would be of no use for him to apply for any situation. His Prime Minister played on the violin, his Secretary performed on the horn, while his Treasurer was superb upon the great drum.
In this same museum is a curious wedge-shaped boxwood fiddle, decorated with allegorical scenes, and dated 1578. Dr. Burney states that it has no more tone than a violin with a sordine. It is said to have been presented by Queen Elizabeth to the Earl of Leicester, and bears both of their coats-of-arms in silver on the sounding-board.
It was upon this violin that Paganini afterward performed in all his concerts, and the great virtuoso left it to the town of Genoa, where it is now preserved in a glass case in the Museum. An excellent engraving of it, from a photograph, was published in 1875 in George Hart's book on "The Violin."
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