"When our grandsire took our granddame home,
The lady was bride, and he bridegroom."
The player of the clarionet blew until his thin cheeks were puffed out like a drum, and his eyes almost started out of their sockets. The violin-player showed equal zeal in the use of his bow; while the violincello sounded mightily; and the tones of the flute pierced through bones and marrow. When the dance was finished, its hero, wiping the dew from his forehead, addressed his companions in amusement, saying, "All's well that ends well;" and drinking a glass of cold beer, he left the inn, accompanied by the whole party, who went shouting and laughing through the silent village, disturbing the quiet of its inhabitants.
"Young blood is warm," said the landlord, as he heard the noise, and was extinguishing the lights in the salle.
A traveller, who had been prevented by the uproar of the dancers and the sound of music from going to bed, heard the remark of the landlord, and replied, with asperity, "Certainly a noble way of exercising youthful spirits to destroy the night's rest of industrious peasants, to waste the earnings of honest parents, and to ruin their own health. Such a dancing-room is a chapel of Satan, and the landlord and the musicians are the priests."
Had the speaker been a common person, assuredly the landlord would have poured out his wrath on him. He contented himself, however, by saying to the musicians, when the stranger had left, "That fellow must surely be a Methodist, a Quaker, or a Herrnhuter! Were all the world of his way of thinking, we should soon be ruined."
The musicians nodded their assent to this remark; and after dividing their gains, they likewise left the house.
It was quite dark, therefore no wonder that the tired and not perfectly sober band had great difficulty in finding their way down the flight of steps which led from the house to the street. The violincellist missed his footing, and rolled from the top to the bottom of the stairs. A crashing noise announced his arrival on the ground, and also the fate of the instrument.
"So the violincello is in the mud!" cried the clarionet-player, with the utmost stoical indifference, from the top of the stairs.
"Not at all; quite the reverse!" replied the prostrate fiddler, with equal calmness; "the mud is in the violincello." He raised himself up from the instrument, which had so broken his fall, that he felt not much the worse of it; and amidst jokes and laughter, the damage done to the violincello was examined, and was found to be considerable, as the back part of it was entirely broken to pieces.
"I have heard my father say," began the flute-player, in a tone of condolence, "that the more a violincello was glued together, the finer were its tones."