instrument shaped exactly like a violin. It had three strings, which were tuned with pegs like a violin, but it was played by fingering wooden keys, like those of a large concertina and by at the same time turning a handle which protruded from the base of the violin. The musician said he could play any kind of music, sad, joyous, and sacred, and he gave examples of all three of the various styles; they were to my ear indistinguishable in kind; they appeared to me all tinged with the same quick and deliciously plaintive melancholy, and the _kind_ of music made by this instrument instantly suggested that which Schubert has rendered in the accompaniment of a song called “Der Leiermann”: the plaintive comfortable noise of the very first organ-grinders. But what I wondered at the time was this. Is the instrument, the sound of which Schubert renders in his song “Der Leiermann,” this very identical “lyre” which my blind beggar was playing in the village Giebko, government of Kharkov? Or is Schubert just imitating the noise of the earliest portable grinding organs, whose music is made by wind proceeding from a bellows into a small box and thence into pipes, and whose principle of construction is exactly the same, though the scale is different, as that of the organ in St. Paul’s Cathedral? In any case the noise made by this “lyre” was the same in kind as the noise which Schubert imitates in the accompaniment of his song “Der Leiermann.” I afterwards ascertained that this instrument is called Leierkasten in Germany, _Vielle_ in France, and Hurdy-gurdy in English, and that my blind beggar must have been identical with Schubert’s Leiermann.