Yet, although English of the purest breed, there are Virginians who really love music; just as you shall find Spaniards with red hair, bashful Irishmen, women with beards, hens that crow, bullies with courage, mules without guile, and short sermons and true happiness. I do not allude to our charming girls who flock to the occasional opera that visits Richmond,—for in Richmond, as elsewhere, there are dozens of reasons for flocking to the opera. No; I had in my mind the far-famed Virginia fidddler—mock him not, ye profane—who, though frowned upon by the moralist, viewed askance from the pulpit, without honor as without profit in his own country, still scrapes away as merrily as he can under the load of obloquy that weighs him down. But his devotion, if heroic, wins him no glory; for the people of Virginia, forgetting, with the usual ingratitude of republics, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, regard the worthlessness of the whole fiddling tribe as axiomatic. Nay, worse, there is a vague feeling that the thing is vulgar. Now, in that word lies the key to Mary Rolfe’s distress of mind. Born and bred in the midst of that singularly pure, and simple, and refined society of Richmond in the ante-bellum days, inheriting from her father a love of all that was most beautiful in English prose and verse, as well as led by his hand to the nooks where were to be culled its choicest flowers; her manners formed and her instincts moulded by her mother upon the classic types of Virginia patrician life of the olden time, she was more than a representative of her class. The refined delicacy of her nature amounted, if not to a fault, at least to a misfortune. In the society of those like herself she was easy, affable, winning; but the slightest deviation from high breeding chilled her into silence and unconquerable reserve. The most trivial social solecism shocked, vulgarity stunned her. And fiddling! According to her high-wrought soul the thing was unworthy of a gentleman. Nor is this so much to be wondered at, for, although distinguished violinists had visited Richmond, it so happened that she had never heard one. Her knowledge of violin music was confined to fiddling pure and simple,—the compositions, jigs and reels; the performers, as a rule, negroes. If, then, I have in any measure succeeded in depicting Mary as she really was,—an exquisitely refined, oversensitive girl just out of school, her head full of poetry and romance, her heart beginning to flutter with a sweet pain in presence of an Ideal Hero, so suddenly, so strangely encountered,—my reader (being a woman) will appreciate the shock she felt on that Christmas morning. It will be remembered that it was Aunt Phœbe who had been the first to describe the Don’s performance to the young ladies. “Play de fiddle? Can _he_ play de fiddle? I b’lieve you, honey! Why, Lor’ bless me, I do p’int’ly b’lieve into my soul dat Mr. Smith is de top fiddler of de Nunited States!”