How many hands have touched this precious treasure! What scenes has it passed through! How many countries has it visited! How many thousands have listened to its voice! The violin has outlived them all, generation after generation. If it could only tell us all its experiences and adventures since it was taken down from its nail in a Cremona workshop and pronounced ready for the purchaser who had ordered it! [Illustration: FIRST VIOLIN, SYMPHONY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK _Alexander Saslavsky_] Romance, romance, romance, and nothing but romance, clings around old violins, just like the scent in an old Chinese rose-jar. You cannot get rid of the aroma. And, moreover, you do not want to. This atmosphere of the Past gives enchantment to a violin as it does to a Ming vase. Then there is something very thrilling in the fact that the violin has a charmed life. Nothing can hurt a violin very much. If it is smashed into a thousand bits, a clever repairer can put all the pieces together again; and the instrument is little the worse for the shock. Then, too, a valuable old Cremona seems to defy theft. If a thief runs away with one, he has trouble to get rid of it, because few are willing to buy it from him. The pedigree of every famous violin is known; or, in other words, the name of every one of its owners is on record. A fine instrument can be identified eventually. All violins may look alike to you now; but not after your eyes have been taught to know them. No two violins were ever made that were exactly alike; although, of course, all those that were made by any one maker have, generally speaking, the same characteristics. These characteristics are what one has to learn, in order to become an expert, or a connoisseur. All the celebrated makers gradually developed a “model,” as it is called; and experts and connoisseurs can tell almost at a glance from what workshop any instrument came. Not only the model, or pattern, or shape, as we might call it, declares the maker, but every maker had a special varnish. Every maker also had a special way of carving the scroll, or head, and of cutting the sweeping _f_-holes that give the violin so much expression. And what would the violin be without these graceful _f_-holes? It would not only lose its tone, but much of its beauty. These sound-holes are of the utmost importance. Their shape, width and position have all been determined through years—centuries indeed—of experiment. The whole system by which the sound-waves are set in motion in the _inside_ of a violin and the way they cross each other and issue forth from these sound-holes is strange in the highest degree. It is a miracle! Altogether, the violin is a very charming, fascinating, mysterious, romantic, delightful, and lovable instrument. * * * * * Although the violin may appear to your eyes as a very simple instrument, it is really a very complex one.