o for my purpose.

Well, but as so many go by what so many advocate and so many do, why
not try it by placing the plate in this vice, and applying a well
rosined bow to draw forth its sonority, etc., etc.? I will do so. I
fear many of you, even just in front of me, will scarce gather much
from the thin, miserable stuff which the wood says is 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.

I 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!

Well, 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 use, and that is, as I do now, I make the plate rigid,
but free to vibrate, so as to allow those mysterious motions play,
and I place my ear at one extremity whilst I scratch or scrape, or
move the rosined bow over the other.

With a similar result--the tone is not what I want, nor what it
ought to be from a piece of really old, well grown wood. But mind,
it does not follow that, given these conditions, the genuine thing
would be what I want; but there would be more likelihood of its
being so, and less annoyance in laying it as