RUSTIC SOUNDS 5 



pleasant tone of the whistle, nor was there any art 

 in the making of it. 



A primaeval musical instrument called the 

 * Whit horn ' I have seen in the possession of the late 

 Mr. Taphouse, of Oxford. It is a conical tube of 

 bark held together with thorns and sounded by 

 means of a rough oboe-reed made of bark ; there 

 were no finger-holes, and is said to have yielded 

 a harsh shriek on one note. It was, I think, 

 played on May ist, or else at Whitsuntide. It 

 is to Mr. Taphouse that I owe my introduction 

 to the pipe and tabor which form the subject of a 

 paper in this volume. The pipe is shrill in its 

 upper register, but this is no great fault in an 

 instrument meant to be played out of doors : the 

 same fault is to be found with the flageolet, and the 

 penny whistle. But the last named instrument is 

 reminiscent of a man playing outside a London 

 public-house, and we know from the story of the 

 perfidious Sergeant in The Wrong Box to what 

 lengths it may lead us.^ 



The most truly rustic instrument (and here 

 I mean an instrument of polite life — an orchestral 

 instrument) is undoubtedly the oboe. The bassoon 

 runs it hard, but has a touch of comedy and a 

 stronger flavour of necromancy, while the oboe is 

 quite good and simple in nature and is excessively 

 in earnest ; it seems to have in it the ghost 

 of a sunburnt boy playing to himself under 

 a tree, in a ragged shirt unbuttoned at the 

 throat, a boy created by Velasquez. To 



* I have an antiquarian interest in the penny whistle as being 

 a poor relation of the "recorder" of our forefathers. 



