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Updated: May 21, 2025
Its notes leaped gaily from the strings of every theatre orchestra; soubrettes in fluffy raiment and silk stockings yelled it singly and in chorus; hand-organs blared it forth; dancers kicked up their toes to it; it monopolized the atmosphere for its dwelling-place; it was everywhere. Until one night, however, it did not touch the ear of Billy Folsom.
Meyerbeer was born at Berlin, September 5, 1794, and was a musical prodigy from his earliest years. When only four years old he would repeat on the piano the airs he heard from the hand-organs, composing his own accompaniment. At five he took lessons of Lanska, a pupil of Clementi, and at six he made his appearance at a concert.
Then come plaster or pasteboard gondolas, skiffs, wherries, steamships, and ferry-boats, all made with wondrous skill and freighted with caramels. Imitation rackets, battledoor and shuttlecock, hoops and sticks, castanets, cup and ball, tambourines, guitars, violins, hand-organs, banjos, and drums, all have their little day as fashionable favors.
And then I hustled him out of the crowd into a cool interior; for the Gate City was stirred that day, and the hand-organs wisely eliminated "Marching Through Georgia" from their repertories. "Now, what deviltry are you up to?" I asked of O'Keefe when there were a table and things in glasses between us.
I don't like to say it, he continued, but poets commonly have no larger stock of tunes than hand-organs; and when you hear them piping up under your window, you know pretty well what to expect. The more stops, the better. Do let them all be pulled out in their turn! So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me one of his stateliest songs, and after it a gay chanson, and then a string of epigrams.
In they came by way of the Lodge, escorted by Bab and Betty, full of glee, for hand-organs were rare in those parts, and the children delighted in them. Smiling till his white teeth shone and his black eyes sparkled, the man played away while the monkey made his pathetic little bows, and picked up the pennies Thorny threw him. "It is warm, and you look tired.
He had seen her every day since then every day! He most clearly of all recalled her as a school-girl. Those were the days of the German bands of six and seven and even eight pieces, wandering as the hand-organs do now. And always with them came a swarm of little girls who danced when the band played, and of little boys who listened and watched.
Undaunted by all they had done that day, they would go out again after dinner, when Amsterdam was blue and silver and shining steel in the quiet streets, with a flare of yellow light in the lively ones, where people crowded the roadways, listening to the crash of huge hand-organs, or shopping until ten o'clock.
And she grabbed up her eggs, and this time she took them to the monkey, who played five hand-organs at once. And the monkey was a good-natured sort of a chap, so he hatched out the cowbird's eggs for her, and soon he had a lot of little calfbirds, and when they grew up they gave him no end of trouble. "Well, now you are safe home," said Uncle Wiggily to the pussy, "I will travel on."
Mappo had only lived in the jungle where men very seldom came, and those men were brown or black men. But men knew monkeys were in the woods, and men wanted the monkeys for circuses, for menageries and for hand-organs. That is the reason men try to catch monkeys. Mappo looked all around the forest from the top of the tree where he had come to rest. He saw no signs of danger.
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