"A dealer of a different stamp is Michael Schnapps, well known in the trade, and the profession too, as a ravenous Fiddle-ogre, who buys and sells everything that bears the Fiddle shape, from a Double-Bass to a dancing-master's pocketable Kit. His house is one vast warehouse, with Fiddles on the walls, Fiddles on the staircases, and Fiddles hanging like stalactites from the ceilings. To him the tyros resort when they first begin to scrape; he will set them up for ten shillings, and swop them up afterwards, step by step, to ten or twenty guineas, and to ten times that amount if they are rich enough and green enough to continue the experiment. Schnapps imports Fiddles in the rough, under the designation of toys, most of which are the production of his peasant-countrymen bordering on the Black Forest; and with these he supplies the English provinces and the London toy and stationers' shops. He is, further, a master of the Fiddle-making craft himself, and so consummate an adept in repairing that nothing short of consuming fire can defeat his art. When Pinker, of Norwich, had his Cremona smashed all to atoms in a railway collision, Schnapps rushed down to the scene of the accident, bought the lot of splintered fragments for a couple of pounds, and in a fortnight had restored the magnificent Stradivari to its original integrity, and cleared 150 guineas by its sale. But Schnapps is a humbug at bottom--an everlasting copyist and manufacturer of dead masters, Italian, German, and English. He has sold more Amatis in his time than Amati himself ever made. He knows the secret of the old varnish; he has hidden stores of old wood--planks of cherry-tree and mountain-ash centuries old, and worm-eaten sounding-boards of defunct Harpsichords, and reserves of the close-grained pine hoarded for ages. He has a miniature printing press, and a fount of the lean-faced, long-forgotten type, and a stock of the old ribbed paper torn from the fly-leaves of antique folios; and, of course, he has always on hand a collection of the most wonderful instruments at the most wonderful prices, for the professional man or the connoisseur. "'You vant to py a Pfeedel,' says Schnapps. 'I sall sell you de pest--dat ish, de pest for the mowny. Vat you sall gif for him?' "'Well, I can go as far as ten guineas,' says the customer. "'Ten kinnis is good for von goot Pfeedel; bote besser is tventy, tirty, feefty kinnis, or von hunder, look you; bote ten kinnis is goot--you sall see.' "Schnapps is all simplicity and candour in his dealings. The probability is, however, that his ten-guinea Fiddle would be fairly purchased at five, and that you might have been treated to the same article had you named thirty or forty guineas instead of ten. "I once asked Schnapps if he knew wherein lay the excellence of the old Italian instruments. "'Mein Gott!--if I don't, who de teifil does?'