never seen nor heard of, that he
could not proceed. "Gentlemen," said he, "I see that a good many of your
instruments are out of order, and most of them need a little oil, or
something of the kind. Our best plan will be to adjourn for a week.
Leave all your instruments with me, and I will have them in perfect
condition by the time we meet again." Before the band again came
together, the young teacher, by working night and day, had gained a
sufficient insight into the nature of the instruments to instruct those
who knew nothing of them.

Jonas Chickering was essentially a mechanic,--a most skilful, patient,
thoughtful, faithful mechanic,--and it was his excellence as a mechanic
which enabled him to rear an establishment which, beginning with one or
two pianos a month, was producing, at the death of the founder, in 1853,
fifteen hundred pianos a year. It was he who introduced into the piano
the full iron frame. It was he who first made American pianos that were
equal to the best imported ones. He is universally recognized as the
true founder of the manufacture of the piano in the United States. No
man has, perhaps, so nobly illustrated the character of the American
mechanic, or more honored the name of American citizen. He was the soul
of benevolence, truth, and honor. When we have recovered a little more
from the infatuation which invests "public men" with supreme importance,
we shall better know how to value those heroes of the apron, who, by a
life of conscientious toil, place a new source of happiness, or of
force, within the reach of their fellow-citizens.

Henry Steinway, the founder of the great house of Steinway and Sons, has
had a career not unlike that of Mr. Chickering. He also, in his native
Brunswick, amused his boyhood by repairing old instruments of music, and
making new ones. He made a cithara and a guitar for himself with only
such tools as a boy can command. He also was apprenticed to a
cabinet-maker, and was drawn away, by natural bias, from the business he
had learned, to the making of organs and pianos. For many years he was a
German piano-maker, producing, in the slow, German manner, two or three
excellent instruments a month; striving ever after higher excellence,
and growing more and more dissatisfied with the limited sphere in which
the inhabitant of a small German state necessarily works. In 1849, being
then past fifty years of age, and the father of four intelligent and
gifted sons, he looked t