ithout her shoe until the master found his
fiddling-stick knew the worth of the fiddler's art.

It may have been from a play on the word catgut that so many of these
ditties represent pussy in relation with the fiddle. True fiddler's
magic belonged to the cat whose fiddling made the cow jump over the
moon, the little dog laugh and the dish run away with the spoon. Rarely
accomplished too was the cat that came fiddling out of the barn with a
pair of bagpipes under her arm, singing "Fiddle cum fee, the mouse has
married the humble bee."

Scientists tell us that crickets, grasshoppers, locusts and the like are
fiddlers. Their hind legs are their fiddle-bows, and by drawing these
briskly up and down the projecting veins of their wing-covers they
produce the sounds that characterize them. Was it in imitation of these
small winged creatures that man first experimented with the friction of
bow and strings as a means of making music? Scarcely. It was the result
of similar instinct on a larger human scale.

String instruments played with a bow may be traced to a remote period
among various Oriental peoples. An example of their simplest form exists
in the ravanastron, or banjo-fiddle, supposed to have been invented by
King Ravana, who reigned in Ceylon some 5,000 years ago. It is formed of
a small cylindrical sounding-body, with a stick running through it for a
neck, a bridge, and a single string of silk, or at most two strings. Its
primitive bow was a long hairless cane rod which produced sound when
drawn across the silk. Better tone was derived from strings plucked with
fingers or plectrum, and so the rude contrivance remained long
undeveloped.

The European violin is the logical outcome of the appliance of the bow
to those progenitors of the pianoforte, the Greek monochord and lyre,
precisely as our music is the outgrowth of the diatonic scale developed
by the Greeks from those instruments. Numerous obstacles stand in the
way of defining its story, but it is known that from the ninth century
to the thirteenth bow instruments gained in importance. They divided
into two classes--the viol proper, with flat back and breast and
indented sides, to which belonged the veille, videl, or as it has been
called, guitar-fiddle, and the pear-shaped type, such as the gigue and
rebec. The latter is what Chaucer calls the rubible.

Possibly an impulse was given the fiddle by the Moorish rebab, brought
into Spain in the eighth century, but