leaving forever--his father's violin in a green
bag, with a leathern drawstring. On the bag were his father's initials,
woven into the cloth by the boy's mother--a present from sweetheart to
lover before their marriage.

Christoph was a musician, too, and a prosperous fellow--quite the
antithesis of his father. It takes a lot of love to bring up a child,
and the miracle of mother-love is a constant wonder to every thinking
person. Without mother-love how would the cross-grained, perverse little
tyrant ever survive the buffets which the world is sure to give? It is
love that makes existence possible.

Christoph wished to be kind to his little brother, but it was a kindness
of the head and not of the heart. Only an hour a day was allowed the boy
for playing on the violin he had brought in the green bag, because
Christoph and his wife "did not want to hear the noise." Then when the
boy stole off to the forest and played there, he was waylaid on the way
home and well cuffed for disobeying orders. All this seems very much
like the Goneril and Cordelia business, or the history of Cinderella,
but as Johann Sebastian told it himself in the after-years, we have
reason to believe it was not fiction.

Little Johann Sebastian had been his father's favorite, and this fact
perhaps made Christoph fear the boy was going to tread in his father's
lazy footsteps. So he set about to discipline the lad.

It must be admitted that Johann Ambrosius Bach, who whittled out fiddles
in the sun, and who drank much beer out of an earthen pot, was
shiftless, but it further seems that he was tender-hearted and kind and
took much interest in teaching Sebastian to play the violin, even while
the child wore dresses. And sometimes I think it is really better, if
you have to choose, to drink beer out of an earthen pot and be kind and
gentle, than to have a sharp nose for other folks' faults and be
continually trying to pinch and prod the old world into the straight and
narrow path of virtue. Yet there is wisdom in all folly, and I can see
that the prohibition concerning little Sebastian's playing the violin
only an hour a day--mind you! was not without its benefits. Surely it
would often be a wise bit of diplomacy on the part of the teacher to
order the pupil not to study his arithmetic lesson but an hour a day, on
penalty. Of course it might happen occasionally that the pupil in an
earnest desire to please, might not study at all, yet there are
except