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A venerable and hitherto decorous old deacon of Roxbury not only left the church when the hated bass-viol began its accompanying notes, but he stood for a long time outside the church door stridently "caterwauling" at the top of his lungs. When expostulated with for this unseemly and unchristianlike annoyance he explained that he was "only mocking the banjo."
The Streets mostly with Water running thro' 'em, like unto Rotterdam, all going to and fro done in Boats called Gondoles, a dismal, Hearse-looking kind of Wherry, with a prow like the head of a Bass-Viol, and rowed, or rather shoved along with a Pole by a Mad, Ragged Fellow, that bawls out verses from Tasso, one of their Poets, as he plies his Oar.
Why, boys, in them days, I've walked ten miles over to Sherburne of a Sunday mornin', jest to play the bass-viol in the same singers' seat with Huldy.
Burr Gordon stood still in the road and listened. The constituents of the concert resolved themselves to his ear. There was a wonderful soprano, a tenor, a bass, one sweet boy's voice, a bass-viol, and a violin. They were practising a fugue. The soprano rang out like the invitation of an angel, "Come, my beloved, haste away, Cut short the hours of thy delay,"
The picture that gave him the victory and the prize of honour was that wherein he painted Music, in which are depicted three very beautiful young women, one of whom, the most beautiful, is playing a great bass-viol, looking down at the fingerboard of the instrument, the attitude of her person showing that her ear and her voice are fixed intently on the sound; and of the other two, one is playing a lute, and the other singing from a book.
"We would love to stay," smiled Silver Ears, "but I fear Mammy will go home early." "Grandpa Bull Frog plays a bass-viol," explained Nimble-toes. "He plays very nicely." "So does my Uncle Squeaky," bragged Buster, "only he plays a fiddle." A big black snake crawled along just then and frightened the twins so badly that they all had to run away from the pond.
The door of the front room had been taken off its hinges to give more space, and that of the room Henchard sat in being ajar, he could see fractional parts of the dancers whenever their gyrations brought them near the doorway, chiefly in the shape of the skirts of dresses and streaming curls of hair; together with about three-fifths of the band in profile, including the restless shadow of a fiddler's elbow, and the tip of the bass-viol bow.
When the first inviting notes of the mazurka sounded, I looked about me with composure, and with a cool and easy air approached a long-faced young lady with a red and shiny nose, a mouth that stood awkwardly open, as though it had come unbuttoned, and a scraggy neck that recalled the handle of a bass-viol. I went up to her, and, with a perfunctory scrape of my heels, invited her to the dance.
Frederick strutted about like a cock in his new sky-blue jacket and asserted his position as the first beau of the village. When the lord of the manor and his family arrived he happened to be sitting behind the bass-viol, sounding the lowest string with great strength and much decorum.
Yet Mr. Thomas White is a good-sized man, and now, at all events, rather overweight for a dragoon. Yesterday came one of those bands of music that seem to itinerate everywhere about the country. It consisted of a young woman who played the harp, a bass-viol player, a fiddler, a flutist, and a bugler, besides a little child, of whom, I suppose, the woman was the mother.
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