I was at first almost painfully aware of my 'cello's conspicuousness because I had abandoned for it an instrument so retiring by nature that you might carry it till death in your side pocket, yet never have it contribute an unusual episode to your career. But from the moment when I discovered the exaggerated old fiddle in the attic, slumbering in its black coffin, and wondered what it was all about, and brought it resurrection and life,--events began. I have never known exactly what was the magic inherent in the dull, guttural, discouraged protests of the strings which I experimentally plucked that day. But their songs-without-words-or-music seemed to me pregnant with promises of beauty and romance far beyond the ken of the forthright flute. So then and there I decided to embark upon the delicate and dangerous enterprise of learning another instrument.
It was indeed delicate and dangerous because it had to be prosecuted as secretly as sketching hostile fortifications. Father must not suspect. I feared that if he heard the demonic groans of a G string in pain, or the ghoulish whimperings of a manhandled A, he would mount to the attic, throw back his head, look down upon me through those lower crescents of his spectacles which always made him look a trifle unsympathetic, and pronounce that baleful formula: 'My son, come into my study!' For I knew he labored under the delusion that I already 'blew in' too much time on the flute, away from the companionship of All Gaul, _enteuthen exelaunei_, and Q.E.D. As for any additional instrument, I feared that he would reduce it to a pulp at sight, and me too.
My first secret step was to secure a long strip of paper to be pasted on the finger-board under the strings. It was all pockmarked with black dots and letters, so that if the music told you to play the note G, all you had to do was to contort your neck properly and remove your left hand from the path of vision, then gaze cross-eyed and upside down at the finger-board until you discovered the particular dot labeled G. The next move was to clap your fingertip upon that dot and straighten out your neck and eyes and apply the bow. Then out would come a triumphant G,--that is, provided your fingers had not already rubbed G's characteristically undershot lip so much as to erase away the letter's individuality. In that case, to be sure, all your striving for G might result only in C after all.