ss, Made perfect violins, the
needed paths For inspiration and high mastery."

And as if the year were not full enough of glory, the school-teacher
sent him a book with a wonderful poem in it.

That summer's teaching had been the freak of a college student, who had
gone back to his senior year strengthened by his experience of village
life. Anthony Croft, who was only three or four years his junior, had
been his favorite pupil and companion.

"How does Tony get along?" asked the Widow Croft when the teacher came
to call.

"Tony? Oh, I can't teach him anything."

Tears sprang to the mother's eyes.

"I know he ain't much on book learning," she said apologetically, "but
I'm bound he don't make you no trouble in deportment."

"I mean," said the school-teacher gravely, "that I can show him how to
read a little Latin and do a little geometry, but he knows as much in
one day as I shall ever know in a year."

Tony crouched by the old fireplace in the winter evenings, dropping his
knife or his compasses a moment to read aloud to his mother, who sat in
the opposite corner knitting:--

"Of old Antonio Stradivari,--him
Who a good quarter century and a half ago
Put his true work in the brown instrument,
And by the nice adjustment of its frame
Gave it responsive life, continuous
With the master's finger-tips, and perfected
Like them by delicate rectitude of use."

The mother listened with painful intentness. "I like the sound of it,"
she said, "but I can't hardly say I take in the full sense."

"Why mother," said the lad, in a rare moment of self-expression, "you
know the poetry says he cherished his sight and touch by temperance;
that an idiot might see a straggling line and be content, but he had
an eye that winced at false work, and loved the true. When it says his
finger-tips were perfected by delicate rectitude of use, I think it
means doing everything as it is done in heaven, and that anybody
who wants to make a perfect violin must keep his eye open to all the
beautiful things God has made, and his ear open to all the music he has
put into the world, and then never let his hands touch a piece of work
that is crooked or straggling or false, till, after years and years of
rightness, they are fit to make a violin like the squire's, a violin
that can say everything, a violin that an angel wouldn't be ashamed to
play on."

Do these words seem likely ones to fall from the lips o