Scan 436
The violin, its famous makers and their imitators, 1887
12 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1splintered fragments for a couple of pounds, and in a fortnight had restored the magnificent Stradivari to its original integrity, and cleared 150 guineas by its sale. But Schnapps is a humbug at bottom—an everlasting copyist and manufacturer of dead masters, Italian, German, and English. He has sold more Amatis in his time than Amati himself ever made. He knows the secret of the old varnish; he has hidden stores of old wood—planks of cherry-tree and mountain-ash centuries old, and worm-eaten sounding-boards of defunct Harpsichords, and reserves of the close-grained pine hoarded for ages. He has a miniature printing press, and a fount of the lean-faced, long-forgotten type, and a stock of the old ribbed paper torn from the fly-leaves of antique folios; and, of course, he has always on hand a collection of the most wonderful instruments at the most wonderful prices, for the professional man or the connoisseur.
3"'You vant to py a Pfeedel,' says Schnapps. 'I sall sell you de pest—dat ish, de pest for the mowny. Vat you sall gif for him?'
5"'Well, I can go as far as ten guineas,' says the customer.
7"'Ten kinnis is good for von goot Pfeedel; bote besser is twenty, tirty, feefty kinnis, or von hunder, look you; bote ten kinnis is goot—you sall see.'
9"Schnapps is all simplicity and candour in his dealings. The probability is, however, that his ten-guinea Fiddle would be fairly purchased at five, and that you might have been treated to the same article had you named thirty or forty guineas instead of ten.
11"I once asked Schnapps if he knew wherein lay the excellence of the old Italian instruments.
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