something having the power of destroying a germ destined, if left to
age, to become the soul of resonance, bringing it at once to a
wretched maturity, its cells starved so, that when the strain of
three hours' play in a hot room is put upon it, dumb is its voice,
poor at the best, and it is played out.

Do you not see that the soft part of the wood running between the
lines or reeds, and where lie the cells of the pine, are too rapidly
agitated, and cannot possibly hold their own under such worn-out
conditions? whereas, given honest wood and genuine age, we should
get strength to resist, and from such resistance would come what we
seek, richness, possible only from sound resonance.

For these cells must have the vigour of mature age, if that age be
150 years when naturally dried, in them; and my contention is, that
the soundest is that which has not been robbed of its sap, as
turpentine, before it be felled on the mountain side; but cut when
well-grown, and well looked after for some years, then cut on the
quarter (of which, later), and left for at _least_ seven more years
before we use it; and mind, even then, it is _new wood_.

I say, this is _my_ contention, and how I account for many superior,
great-souled violins, which it has been my hard struggle to produce,
yet now gaze on with pride; almost glorying in that enthusiasm which
enabled me to combat all against my theory, and do that which I
believe was done two hundred years ago, to such fine issues, reviled
or not for so doing, is now to me of little consequence.

Yet you must be told that there has been fierce, very fierce,
controversy on this point, some going half-way and asserting only a
portion of the sap should be withdrawn; some (and one of them a
great chemist, a friend of mine) fighting hard to have it all taken
away, and artificially dried after that! Does nature do this to the
lungs of a Madame Patti or a Sims Reeves before she turns them on
the world? Nonsense!

But it is tests you want, and I will supply another, somewhat
original. This piece I called above, bad, I lay aside, as No. 1;
another, worse in grain, but, I believe, honest, as far as having
the sap left in it goes, but not old, No. 2; and a magnificent piece
of very old Swiss pine, brown, and honestly brown, with, probably,
two or three hundred years of exposure as a beam in a Swiss chalet
(for from that place and that dwelling I am prepared to prove it
comes to me), which I number 3.