t he never
did, for he was not of many words, even to his wife. His language
was his music,--as hers, her cares! He was more communicative to his
barbiton, as the learned Mersennus teaches us to call all the varieties
of the great viol family. Certainly barbiton sounds better than
fiddle; and barbiton let it be. He would talk to THAT by the hour
together,--praise it, scold it, coax it, nay (for such is man, even the
most guileless), he had been known to swear at it; but for that excess
he was always penitentially remorseful. And the barbiton had a tongue of
his own, could take his own part, and when HE also scolded, had much
the best of it. He was a noble fellow, this Violin!--a Tyrolese, the
handiwork of the illustrious Steiner. There was something mysterious in
his great age. How many hands, now dust, had awakened his strings ere
he became the Robin Goodfellow and Familiar of Gaetano Pisani! His very
case was venerable,--beautifully painted, it was said, by Caracci. An
English collector had offered more for the case than Pisani had ever
made by the violin. But Pisani, who cared not if he had inhabited a
cabin himself, was proud of a palace for the barbiton. His barbiton, it
was his elder child! He had another child, and now we must turn to her.

How shall I describe thee, Viola? Certainly the music had something to
answer for in the advent of that young stranger. For both in her form
and her character you might have traced a family likeness to that
singular and spirit-like life of sound which night after night threw
itself in airy and goblin sport over the starry seas...Beautiful
she was, but of a very uncommon beauty,--a combination, a harmony of
opposite attributes. Her hair of a gold richer and purer than that
which is seen even in the North; but the eyes, of all the dark, tender,
subduing light of more than Italian--almost of Oriental--splendour. The
complexion exquisitely fair, but never the same,--vivid in one moment,
pale the next. And with the complexion, the expression also varied;
nothing now so sad, and nothing now so joyous.

I grieve to say that what we rightly entitle education was much
neglected for their daughter by this singular pair. To be sure, neither
of them had much knowledge to bestow; and knowledge was not then the
fashion, as it is now. But accident or nature favoured young Viola. She
learned, as of course, her mother's language with her father's. And she
contrived soon to read and to write;