After another pause, our friend began once more:--"Don't you think people are much more good and pious nowadays, than they were in the old times?"
"Pious? Devil take it! we weren't so bad in the old times either, only we didn't make such a fuss about it: too little and too much is lame without a crutch: ha, ha!"
Another long silence ensued, at the end of which the young man made a lucky move in asking, "How was it about music in old times?"
A light glistened in the old man's eyes: he held the steel and the tinder in his hand unused, and said, "It's all tooting nowadays. I was sub-organist in the Freiburg Cathedral for two years and a half. That's an organ, let me tell you. I heard the Abbé Vogler: there can't be any thing finer in heaven than his music was.
"I've played at many a harvest-home, too.
"In old times they had stringed instruments principally, and harps and cymbals. Now it's all wind,--big trumpets, little trumpets, and valve-trumpets, all blowing and noise. And what can a musician make at a harvest-home? Three men used to be plenty: now they want six or seven. It used to be small room, small bass, and big pay: now it's big room, double-bass, and half-pay.
"I once travelled through the Schaibach Valley with two comrades; and the thalers seemed to fly into our pockets as if they had wings. Once two villages almost exterminated each other because both wanted me to play at harvest-home the same day."
The old gentleman now passed on to one of his favorite stories of how a village had been so enchanted with his performance on the violin that they had made him their schoolmaster: the Government undertook to install another with dragoons, but the village rebelled and he kept his office.
"Didn't it injure your standing as a teacher to play at the harvest-homes?"
"Not a bit. I've done it more than fifty times in this village, and you won't see a man in it but takes off his cap when he meets me in the street."