Scan 410
The violin, its famous makers and their imitators, 1887
10 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1tioning the circumstance to my father, he informed me, to my astonishment and delight, that if the head of the mongrel Fiddle had been placed on the Stradivari, date 1710, from the Goding collection, it was now, as the effect of recent transmigration, on its own legitimate body!
3A MONTAGNANA INSTRUMENT SHOT THROUGH THE BODY IN THE REVOLUTION OF 1848.
5An enthusiastic amateur was playing the Violin in a house in one of the leading thoroughfares in Paris at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1848. His ardour was so great that the cannonading failed to interrupt him in his pleasurable pursuit; he fiddled on, regardless of all about him, as Nero is said to have done when his capital was in flames, and even left the window of his apartment open. Presently a whizzing noise, terminating in a thud above his head, arrested his attention. Upon his looking up he saw the mark of a bullet in the ceiling. Aroused to a sense of his danger, he closed the windows. Being about to put his Montagnana into its case, his astonishment may be imagined when he discovered a hole through the upper side, and a corresponding chink in the belly, both as sharply cut as though a centre-bit had done the work. His Violin bore witness to his miraculous escape; the bullet lodged in the ceiling had taken his Montagnana in its course. The instrument referred to in this anecdote has been in my possession more than once.
7FIDDLE MARKS AND THE CREDULOUS DABBLEERS.
9It is said that a drowning man will clutch at a straw; the truth of the remark applies to the half-informed in Fiddle
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