Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 300, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 December 1911 — HE FIDDLED SAME OLD TUNE [ARTICLE]

HE FIDDLED SAME OLD TUNE

Scraping of Hungarian Musician Is Too Much for Piano Player*— Arrested and Discharged. New York. —Slow, sad and unfamiliar melodies, played In the entrance halls of apartment houses In Morningside avenue near One Hundred and Twentieth street, warred with the usual piano practice: When the disturbed Paderewskis went out to find the note of discord, tbsy beheld a sobbing man playing a violin. They telephones to police headquarters and went back to the pianos. Ultimately Patrolman Higginaon took the musioal trail and found the sad fiddler playing to a group of attentive Columbia students at One Hundred and Sixteenth street and Amsterdam avenue. The policeman asked for an explanation and was told

by the musician that the air he was playing was so haunting that he could not Btop. But he took the policeman’s advice changed his placing ground. tiie policeman next saw the fiddler on Amsterdam avenue, further north. That time the peripatetic Paganini was arrested. As they walked to the West One Hundred and Twenty-fifth street police station Hlgginson goodnaturedly let his prisoner continue the melody. In the stinion the playing and weeping kept on. So they put the violinist in a cell without his violin. He howled so that the instrument was to him. Instantly the same Hungarian air smote the ears of the other prisoners, The police induced their prisoner to halt long enough between repetitions to say that he was Louis Baton, a Hungarian, a musician of course, and a resident of Far Rockaway. He went to night court In a patrol wagon, still playing. There Magistrate MoQuade discharged him on his promise not to play on the street any more after 6 p. m.