offered for sale was the Palm instrument, or, in fact, Bott's famous
"Duke of Cambridge."

All this technical testimony about violins and violin structure
naturally bored the jury almost to extinction, and even the bitter
personal encounters of counsel did not serve to relieve the dreariness
of the trial. One oasis of humor in this desert of dry evidence gave
them passing refreshment, when a picturesque witness for the defense, an
instrument maker named Franz Bruckner, from South Germany, having been
asked if the violin shown him was a Strad., replied, with a grunt of
disgust: "Ach Himmel, nein!" Being then invited to describe all the
characteristics of genuine Stradivarius workmanship, he tore his hair
and, with an expression of utter hopelessness upon his wrinkled face,
exclaimed despairingly to the interpreter:

"Doctor, if I gave you lessons in this every day for three weeks you
would know no more than you do now!"--an answer which was probably true,
and equally so of the jury who were shouldered with the almost
impossible task of determining from this mass of conflicting opinion
just where the truth really lay.

The chief witness for the defense was John J. Eller, who testified that
he had been a musician for thirty years and a collector of violins; that
the violin in court was the same one produced before the magistrate, and
was not Bott's, but _his own_; that he had first seen it in the
possession of Charles Palm in 1886 in his house in Eighth Street and St.
Mark's Place, New York City, had borrowed it from Palm and played on it
for two months in Seabright, and had finally purchased it from Palm in
1891, and continued to play in concerts upon it, until having been
loaned by him to a music teacher named Perotti, in Twenty-third Street,