This toy instrument consists of two tiny pipes, made of wood and mounted on a pair of tiny bellows. The pipes are stopped with a plug that is pushed in and pulled out to get the sound of the bird’s voice. The cuckoo is used in Haydn’s _Toy Symphony_ and in Humperdinck’s fairy opera of _Hänsel and Gretel_. BELLS Bells are sometimes wanted by a composer. Meyerbeer used a big bell in low F to give the signal for the massacre of the _Huguenots_ and combined it with bassoons and clarinets, which give the music a sinister quality that is very impressive. Rossini has a bell in the second Act of _Guillaume Tell_ and Verdi has a prison bell ring in _Il Trovatore_. “There is nothing more false,” says Lavignac, “than the saying ‘who hears a bell hears one sound only,’ for of all sound-producing agents the bell is perhaps the one which develops the greatest number of over-tones, often discordant even, which sometimes causes a difficulty in discovering which is the fundamental musical tone.” Of course, we can easily see how such would be the case, when the sound is reflected back and forth inside the bell and the old echoes do not have a chance to die away before new vibrations are set in motion. [Illustration: DRUM, XYLOPHONE, AND TRIANGLE, SYMPHONY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK _Samuel Borodkin_] Modern composers rarely use real bells. They give the impression by other means; for instance, for the midnight chime in his _Danse Macabre_, Saint-Saëns has twelve notes plucked on the harp. Strauss in his _Sinfonia Domestica_ tells us it is seven o’clock by seven little taps on the _glockenspiel_ (see page 127). The Bells of Montsalvat in _Parsifal_ are usually played on the “Tubular Chimes,” a row of steel pipes, which are shown in the illustration facing page 126. CHAPTER VIII THE ORCHESTRA