Books › Violin making, 1902 › scan 22
Scan 22
Violin making, 1902
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 10. See the scan on archive.org.
1is its voice, and which its vendors assert to be old, well dried, and that for which it was bought. And I pity, indeed, those receding into the misty background, for nought of this squeak will they hear, and well for them! But as this second test is condemnatory and more and more convinces me of the unworthiness of the wood for a violin of high class (or of any violin destined to live), let me put it to a still more searching one, in fact, to two, neither of which, I venture to assert, will it bear.
3I clamp it to the bench and proceed to cut with a gouge several pieces from the surface of an area of about three inches, close to the thick edge. These I lay aside as No. 1. Deeper, but still from the same area, more, as No. 2. Deeper, but not now as deep as before, for an obvious reason, according to my theory, which is my last heap and No. 3. Now, gentlemen, will you pass round this handful. No. 1, what is there about it? Really, an acid smell! and No. 2, the same, but less pungent; No. 3, less still! Well, there you have absolute proof of roguery, which, if it were lacking in strength, would be borne out by the diminution of the lying brown colour towards the centre of the wood, that colour, not of age, but of fraud, which, named acid, affects the surface more than the interior, and which the novice gloats over as old and pure as God's mountains!
5Well, but in addition to these two farther tests of smell and colour—making wood, almost green wood, of probably not more than four years old, appear to the ignorant one hundred—there is another which I often
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