but on my mentioning the circumstance to my father, he informed me, to my astonishment and delight, that if the head of the mongrel Fiddle had been placed on the Stradivari, date 1710, from the Goding collection, it was now, as the effect of recent transmigration, on its own legitimate body. A MONTAGNANA INSTRUMENT SHOT THROUGH THE BODY IN THE REVOLUTION OF 1848. An enthusiastic amateur was playing the Violin in a house in one of the leading thoroughfares in Paris at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1848. His ardour was so great that the cannonading failed to interrupt him in his pleasurable pursuit; he fiddled on, regardless of all about him, as Nero is said to have done when his capital was in flames, and even left the window of his apartment open. Presently a whizzing noise, terminating in a thud above his head, arrested his attention. Upon his looking up he saw the mark of a bullet in the ceiling. Aroused to a sense of his danger, he closed the windows. Being about to put his Montagnana into its case, his astonishment may be imagined when he discovered a hole through the upper side, and a corresponding chink in the belly, both as sharply cut as though a centre-bit had done the work. His Violin bore witness to his miraculous escape; the bullet lodged in the ceiling had taken his Montagnana in its course. The instrument referred to in this anecdote has been in my possession more than once. FIDDLE MARKS AND THE CREDULOUS DABBLERS. It is said that a drowning man will clutch at a straw; the truth of the remark applies to the half-informed in Fiddle connoisseurship. It is very amusing to note the pile of nothings that these persons heap up under the name of "guiding points" in relation to Fiddles. I will endeavour to call to mind a few of these. I will begin with those little pegs seen on the backs of Violins near the button, and at the bottom; the position of these airy nothings without habitation or name "is deemed indisputable evidence of certain makers' handicraft." One is supposed to have put his pegs to the right, another to the left; another used three, four, and so on. I have frequently heard this remark--"Oh, it cannot be a Stradivari, because the pegs are wrong!" The purfling also forms an important item in the collection of landmarks; certain makers are supposed to have invariably used one kind of purfling, no variation being allowed for width or material adopted. Original instruments are pronounced spurious and spurious original by this test. All Fiddles purfled with whalebone are dubbed "Jacobs," and no other maker is credited with using such purfling.