The idea of a magic fiddle and a wonderworking fiddler was strongly rooted in the popular imagination of many peoples, through many ages. Typical illustrations are the Wonderful Musician of Grimm's Fairy Tales, whose fiddling attracted man and beast, and the lad of Norse folk-lore who won a fiddle that could make people dance to any tune he chose. In Norway the traditional violin teacher is the cascade-haunting musical genius Fossegrim, who, when suitably propitiated, seizes the right hand of one that seeks his aid and moves it across the strings until blood gushes from the finger-tips. Thenceforth the pupil becomes a master, and can make trees leap, rivers stay their course and people bow to his will. Those of us who were brought up on English nursery rhymes early loved the fiddle. Old King Cole, that merry old soul, was a prime favorite, notwithstanding his fondness for pipe and bowl, because when he called for them he called for his fiddlers three and their very fine fiddles. According to Robert of Gloucester, the real King Cole, a popular monarch of Britain in the third century, was the father of St. Helena, the zealous friend of church music. The nursery satire of doubtful antiquity is our sole evidence of his devotion to the art. That John who stoutly refused to sell his fiddle in order to buy his wife a gown placed the ideal above the material. It is to be hoped Mrs. John enjoyed music more than gay attire. Certainly the dame who was forced to dance without 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.