The flute is the most fatal of all instruments. It requires a peculiar conformation and special culture of the thumb-nail, with a view to those holes which have to be only half closed.
The man who plays the flute frequently adds to his other infirmities a mania for keeping tame weasels, turtle-doves, or guinea-pigs.
The Violoncello.
To play the ’cello you require to have long, thin fingers; but it is still more indispensable to have very long hair falling over a greasy coat-collar.
In case of fire, the ’cellist who sees his wife and his ’cello in danger will save the latter first.
His greatest satisfaction, as a general thing, is that of “making the strings weep.” Sometimes, indeed, he succeeds in making his wife and family do the same thing in consequence of a regimen of excessive frugality. Sometimes, too, it happens to him to make people laugh and yawn, but this, according to him, is the result of atmospheric influences.
He can express, through his loftily-attuned strings, all possible griefs and sorrows, except those of his audience and his creditors.
The Drum.
An immense apparatus of wood and sheepskin, full of air and of sinister presages. In melodrama the roll of the drum serves to announce the arrival of a fatal personage, an agent of Destiny; in most cases, an ill-used husband. Sometimes this funereal rumbling serves to describe silence—sometimes to indicate the depths of the prima donna’s despair.
The drummer is a serious man, possessed with the sense of his high dramatic mission. He is able, however, to conceal his conscious pride, and sleep on his instrument when the rest of the orchestra is making all the noise it can. In such cases he commissions the nearest of his colleagues to awaken him at the proper moment.