in the United States. The
small makers, who manufacture from one to five instruments a week,
generally, as already mentioned, buy the different parts from persons
who make only parts. It is a business to make the hammers of a piano; it
is another business to make the "action"; another, to make the keys;
another, the legs; another, the cases; another, the pedals. The
manufacture of the hardware used in a piano is a very important branch,
and it is a separate business to sell it. The London Directory
enumerates forty-two different trades and businesses related to the
piano, and we presume there are not fewer in New York. Consequently,
any man who knows enough of a piano to put one together, and can command
capital enough to buy the parts of one instrument, may boldly fling his
sign to the breeze, and announce himself to an inattentive public as a
"piano-forte-maker." The only difficulty is to sell the piano when it is
put together. At present it costs rather more money to sell a piano than
it does to make one.

When the case is finished, all except the final hand-polish, it is taken
to the sounding-board room. The sounding-board--a thin, clear sheet of
spruce under the strings--is the piano's soul, wanting which, it were a
dead thing. Almost every resonant substance in nature has been tried for
sounding-boards, but nothing has been found equal to spruce. Countless
experiments have been made with a view to ascertain precisely the best
way of shaping, arranging, and fixing the sounding-board, the best
thickness, the best number and direction of the supporting ribs; and
every great maker is happy in the conviction that he is a little better
in sounding-boards than any of his rivals. Next, the strings are
inserted; next, the action and the keys. Every one will pause to admire
the hammers of the piano, so light, yet so capable of giving a telling
blow, which evoke all the music of the strings, but mingle with that
music no click, nor thud, nor thump, of their own. The felt employed
varies in thickness from one sixteenth of an inch to an inch and an
eighth, and costs $5.75 in gold per pound. Only Paris, it seems, can
make it good enough for the purpose. Many of the keys have a double
felting, compressed from an inch and a half to three quarters of an
inch, and others again have an outer covering of leather to keep the
strings from cutting the felt. Simple as the finished hammer looks,
there are a hundred and fifty years of thou