on his hands; or, for want of some better amusement, would
frequent the dangerous and destructive paths of vice and be ruined
forever. ... I am in hopes, therefore, my dear young pupil, that your
violin will occupy your attention at just those very times when, if you
were immoral or dissipated, you would be at the grogshop, gaming-table,
or among vicious females. Such a use of the violin, notwithstanding the
prejudices many hold against it, must contribute to virtue, and furnish
abundance of innocent and entirely unobjectionable amusement. These are
the views with which I hope you have adopted it, and will continue to
cherish and cultivate it."

II.

"There is no bard in all the choir,
.......
Not one of all can put in verse,
Or to this presence could rehearse
The sights and voices ravishing
The boy knew on the hills in spring,
When pacing through the oaks he heard
Sharp queries of the sentry-bird,
The heavy grouse's sudden whir,
The rattle of the kingfisher."

Emerson's _Harp._

Now began an era of infinite happiness, of days that were never long
enough, of evenings when bedtime came all too soon. Oh that there had
been some good angel who would have taken in hand Anthony Croft the
boy, and, training the powers that pointed so unmistakably in certain
directions, given to the world the genius of Anthony Croft, potential
instrument maker to the court of St. Cecilia; for it was not only that
he had the fingers of a wizard; his ear caught the faintest breath of
harmony or hint of discord, as

"Fairy folk a-listening
Hear the seed sprout in the spring,
And for music to their dance
Hear the hedge-rows wake from trance;
Sap that trembles into buds
Sending little rhythmic floods
Of fairy sound in fairy ears.
Thus all beauty that appears
Has birth as sound to finer sense
And lighter-clad intelligence."

As the universe is all mechanism to one man, all form and color to
another, so to Anthony Croft the world was all melody. Notwithstanding
all these gifts and possibilities, the doctor's wife advised the Widow
Croft to make a plumber of him, intimating delicately that these freaks
of nature, while playing no apparent part in the divine economy, could
sometimes be made self-supporting.

The seventeenth year of his life marked a definite epoch in his
development. He studied Jacob Friedheim's treatise u