Books › The heart of music; the story of the violin, 1921 › scan 280
Scan 280
The heart of music; the story of the violin, 1921
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1pot of varnish which had turned out wrong. With stray contributions of cracked maple strips and imperfect strings she contrived, after some days, to get together enough in the way of violin-making materials to carry to her lover.
3She got them, bit by bit, into the cell, with the utmost secrecy, and so work began. Guarnerius groaned aloud as he looked at the crude stuff before him, and thought of his great musical block of pinewood. But he laughed afterward, and kissed the Gaoler's Daughter, and set to work without any further complaint.
5Bad as his materials and tools were, he made some fine instruments, in his own splendid, vigorous style, paying no attention to polish nor neatness, but wringing some resonant sweetness of vibration out of even the flawed red pine that the Gaoler's Daughter had brought him. Some of these instruments are still in existence. They call them the "Prison Josephs." When the violins were finished (how many vivid dreams, I wonder, were shut into them, there in the dim prison cell where the master made them?) the Gaoler's Daughter took them and carried them to dealers, to private individuals artistically inclined, and to musicians. When these failed she hawked them about the streets, and thus sold them all.
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