r hall, of great size, height,
and dimensions, a museum of musical instruments. It would take far too
long to do it justice in description; indeed, on that first brief
investigation I could only form a dim general idea of the richness of
its treasures. What histories--what centuries of story were there piled
up! Musical instruments of every imaginable form and shape, and in every
stage of development. Odd-looking pre-historic bone embryo instruments
from different parts of France. Strange old things from Nineveh, and
India, and Peru, instruments from tombs and pyramids, and ancient ruined
temples in tropic groves--things whose very nature and handling is a
mystery and a dispute--tuned to strange scales which produce strange
melodies, and carry us back into other worlds. On them, perhaps, has the
swarthy Ninevan, or slight Hindoo, or some

"Dusky youth with painted plumage gay"

performed as he apostrophized his mistress's eyebrow. On that
queer-looking thing which may be a fiddle or not--which may have had a
bow or not--a slightly clad slave made music while his master the rayah
played chess with his favorite wife. They are all dead and gone now, and
their jewels are worn by others, and the memory of them has vanished
from off the earth; and these, their musical instruments, repose in a
quiet corner amid the rough hills and oak woods and under the cloudy
skies of the land of music--Deutschland.

Down through the changing scale, through the whole range of cymbal and
spinet, "flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of
music," stand literally before me, and a strange revelation it is. Is it
the same faculty which produces that grand piano of Bechstein's, and
that clarion organ of Silbermann's, and that African drum dressed out
with skulls, that war-trumpet hung with tiger's teeth? After this
nothing is wonderful! Strange, unearthly looking Chinese frames of
sonorous stones or modulated bells; huge drums, painted and carved, and
set up on stands six feet from the ground; quaint instruments from the
palaces of Aztec Incas, down to pianos by Broadwood, Collard & Collard,
and Bechstein.

There were trophies of Streichinstrumente and Blaseinstrumente. I was
allowed to gaze upon two real Stradivarius fiddles. I might see the
development by evolution, and the survival of the fittest in violin,
'cello, contrabass, alto, beside countless others whose very names have
perished with the time that produced them