esent notice. But when the time for the award came,
there was no argument, no discussion, no bare presentment of minor
claims; nothing, in fact, but a hearty indorsement of the singular
merits of the strange instrument."

From that time the Steinways made rapid progress. The tide of
California gold was flowing in, and every day some one was getting rich
enough to treat his family to a new piano. It was the Messrs. Steinway
who chiefly supplied the new demand, without lessening by one instrument
a month the business of older houses. Various improvements in the
framing and mechanism of the piano have been invented and introduced by
them; and, while some members of the family have superintended the
manufacture, others have conducted the not less difficult business of
selling. To this hour, the father of the family, in the dress of a
workman, attends daily at the factory, as vigilant and active as ever,
though now past seventy; and his surviving sons are as laboriously
engaged in assisting him as they were in the infancy of the
establishment.

Besides the Chickerings and the Steinways, there are twenty
manufacturers in the United States whose production exceeds one hundred
pianos per annum. Messrs. Knabe & Co. of Baltimore, who supply large
portions of the South and West, sold about a thousand pianos in the year
1866; W. P. Emerson of Boston, 935; Messrs. Haines Brothers of New York,
830; Messrs. Hallett and Davis of Boston, 462; Ernest Gabler of New
York, 312; Messrs. E. C. Lighte & Co. of New York, 286; Messrs. Hazelton
and Brothers of New York, 269; Albert Webber of New York, 266; Messrs.
Decker Brothers of New York, 256; Messrs. George Steck and Co. of New
York, 244; W. I. Bradbury of New York, 244; Messrs. Lindeman and Sons of
New York, 223; the New York Piano-forte Company, 139. About one half of
all the pianos made in the United States are made in the city of New
York.

To visit one of our large manufactories of pianos is a lesson in the
noble art of taking pains. Genius itself, says Carlyle, means, first of
all, "a transcendent capacity for taking trouble." Everywhere in these
vast and interesting establishments we find what we may call the
perfection of painstaking.

The construction of an American piano is a continual act of defensive
warfare against the future inroads of our climate,--a climate which is
polar for a few days in January, tropical for a week or two in July,
Nova-Scotian now and then in November