Books › Old violins, 1905 › scan 192
Scan 192
Old violins, 1905
10 lines. Read by computer on 27 September 2026. Printed page 172. See the scan on archive.org.
1peculiar way, by his histrionic gifts and a somewhat free-handed distribution of coin, to their revels and their needs.
3Luigi Tarisio soon began to be dominated by the spell of his violin; he got to notice other violins, to repair them all in the way of trade, to possess them, not always very honestly, pitting his own growing knowledge of their merits against the ignorance or necessity of their owners. Gradually Tarisio the carpenter and Tarisio the fiddler seemed to be merged in Tarisio the cunning repairer and Tarisio the still more knowing buyer.
5He bought chiefly by exchange, for money he had little or none; but he began in the early years of this nineteenth century to lead that nomad life—as it seemed to outsiders, the life of a common pedlar—which enabled him to glide without suspicion into half the sacristies and convents in Italy.
7Wherever he went, bag on shoulder, and basket of tools in hand, his cry was not "knives to grind," nor "shoes to mend," but "violins to repair."
9He usually had with him a decoy violin or two, in the shape of common fiddles in good playing order; and over a glass of lemonade or a bottle of wine, in some local café or monasterial domicile of priest or cathedral musician, the cunning Tarisio would view with unaffected pity the miserable old battered Cremonas which were then lurking in a thousand ecclesiastical nooks, split as with the "wolf," ill-adjusted, ill-strung, and generally out of sorts, and whipping out
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