He could go back a good many years, too, could my musical schoolmaster. When in the mood he would tell us how, as a youth, he had been taken to St. Andrew's Hall to hear the great Paganini. With an air of awe he would describe the weird aspect and lean, lank form of the illustrious fiddler, as he stood upon the platform in his closely buttoned swallow-tailed coat, playing amid a silence so intense that his auditors almost feared lest their breathing might break the spell.

'Never before or since,' my teacher would say, ‘have I seen an audience wrought to such a pitch of excitement. It was partly the influence of the individual himself, no doubt; but it was also due to the strangely wonderful beauty of the tone that he obtained from his instrument, and the fascination of a method which completely concealed the nature of the difficulties he surmounted. As I listened I seemed to forget that Paganini was a man. Gradually he assumed the character of a magician, an executant endowed with positively supernatural powers!'