Sebastian Bach, his nephew, was seven years old.

In his day Heinrich Bach was known as the "Great Bach," and he had two
sons who were nearly as famous as himself, and would have been quite so,
were it not for the fact that they had a cousin by the name of Johann
Sebastian.

Johann Sebastian was a son of Johann Ambrosius, a brother of Heinrich,
and Johann Ambrosius, of course, a son of the merry Hans. Johann
Ambrosius was a musician, too, but did not distinguish himself
especially in this line. His distinction lies in the fact that he was
the father of Johann Sebastian, and this is quite enough for any one
man, even if Gail Hamilton did once protest that the office of male
parent was insignificant and devoid of honor.

Johann Ambrosius was a shiftless kind of fellow who drank much beer out
of an earthen pot, and whittled out fiddles, sitting on a bench in the
sun. He sort of let his family shift for themselves. Heinrich Bach, his
brother, used to speak of him as one of his "poor relations," but at the
annual Bach family festival, when a full hundred Bachs gathered to sing
and play, Johann Ambrosius would attend and play on a flute or fiddle
and prove that he was worthy of the name.

On one such annual reunion he took his little boy, Johann Sebastian,
eight years old. The boy's mother had died a year or so before, and
after the mother's death the father seemed to think more of his children
than ever before--which is often the case, I'm told.

They walked the distance, about forty miles, in two days, to where the
festival occurred. It was one of the white milestones in the boy's
life--that trip with its revelation of sleeping in barns, singing, and
playing on many instruments, dining by the wayside, all winding up with
a solemn service at a great stone church, where the preacher gave them
his benediction, and the great company separated with handshakings,
embracings and tears, to meet again in a year. Johann Ambrosius did not
attend the next reunion. Before the Spring had come and birds sang
blithely, a band composed of twenty-five played funeral-dirges at his
grave--and little Johann Sebastian was an orphan.

Johann Sebastian's elder brother, Christoph, who had married a few years
before and moved away, attended the funeral, and when he went back home
he took little Johann Sebastian with him--there was no other place to
go. The lad was allowed to take one thing with him as a remembrance of
the home that he was now