206.—A COSTLY FIDDLE.
Jacob Stainer, of Absam, in the Tyrol, lives in the records of violin construction as the greatest of German makers, if not the only one worthy of more than passing mention. He worked in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and his violins came to be highly valued even in his own day. There is a record that at Dresden he sold a violin to a certain count in the suite of King Charles VI for a goodly sum of gold; and besides this the count undertook to supply him as long as he lived with a hundred florins every month, a good dinner each day, a new suit of clothes every year, as well as two casks of beer, his lodging, fire, and lights. As Stainer lived some sixteen years after this, the violin must have cost the count a goodly sum, all told.