all with the music.  One of Sylvia’s most vivid childhood recollections was the dramatic contrast between old Reinhardt with, and without, his violin.  Partly from age, and partly from a too convivial life, the old, heavily veined hands trembled so that he could scarcely unbutton his overcoat, or handle his cup of hot coffee.  His head shook too, and his kind, rheumy eyes, in their endeavor to focus themselves, seemed to flicker back and forth in their sockets.  The child used to watch him, fascinated, as he fumbled endlessly at the fastenings of his violin-case, and put back the top with uncertain fingers.  She was waiting for the thrilling moment when he should tuck the instrument away under his pendulous double chin and draw his bow across the strings in the long sonorous singing chord, which ran up and down Sylvia’s back like forked lightning.

This was while all the others were tuning and scraping and tugging at their pegs, a pleasant bustle of discord which became so much a part of Sylvia’s brain that she could never in after years hear the strumming and sawing of an orchestra preparing to play, without seeing the big living-room of her father’s house, with its low whitewashed ceiling, its bare, dully shining floor, its walls lined with books, its shabby, comfortable furniture, the whole quickened by the Promethean glow from the blaze in the grate and glorified by the chastened passion of the singing strings.

The two Anglo-Saxon, professors were but able amateurs of their instruments.  Bauermeister, huge, red, and impassive, was by virtue of his blood, a lifelong training, and a musical ancestry, considerably more than an amateur; and old Reinhardt was the master of them all.  His was a history which would have been tragic if it had happened to any but Reinhardt, who cared for nothing but an easy life, beer, and the divine tones which he alone could draw from his violin.  He had offered, fifty years ago in Vienna, the most brilliant promise of a most brilliant career, a promise which had come to naught because of his monstrous lack of ambition, and his endless yielding to circumstance, which had finally, by a series of inconceivable migrations, landed him in the German colony of La Chance, impecunious and obscure and invincibly convinced that he had everything worth having in life.  “Of vat use?” he would say, even now, when asked to play in public—­“de moosic ist all—­and dat is eben so goodt here mit friends.”  Or, “Dere goes a thousand peoples to a goncert—­maybe fife from dat thousand lofes de moosic—­let dose fife gome to me—­and I play dem all day for noding!” or again, more iconoclastically still,—­when told of golden harvests to be reaped, “And for vat den?  I can’t play on more dan von fioleen at a time—­is it?  I got a good one now.  And if I drink more beer dan now, I might make myself seeck!” This with a prodigiously sly wink of one heavy eyelid.