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; and her mother, who, by the way, was a Roman Catholic, taught her betimes to pray.  But then, to counteract all these acquisitions, the strange habits of Pisani, and the incessant watch and care which he required from his wife, often left the child alone with an old nurse, who, to be sure, loved her dearly, but who was in no way calculated to instruct her.

Dame Gionetta was every inch Italian and Neapolitan.  Her youth had been all love, and her age was all superstition.  She was garrulous, fond,—­a gossip.  Now she would prattle to the girl of cavaliers and princes at her feet, and now she would freeze her blood with tales and legends, perhaps as old as Greek or Etrurian fable, of demon and vampire,—­of the dances round the great walnut-tree at Benevento, and the haunting spell of the Evil Eye.  All this helped silently to weave charmed webs over Viola’s imagination that afterthought and later years might labour vainly to dispel.  And all this especially