hold a very long-necked banjo.

It is to the Krishna incarnation of Vishnu that the Hindu scale
is ascribed. According to the legend, Krishna or Vishnu came to
earth and took the form of a shepherd, and the nymphs sang to
him in many thousand different keys, of which from twenty-four
to thirty-six are known and form the basis of Hindu music. To
be sure these keys, being formed by different successions of
quarter-tones, are practically inexhaustible, and the 16,000
keys of Krishna are quite practicable. The differences in tone,
however, were so very slight that only a few, of them have
been retained to the present time.

The Hindus get their flute from the god Indra, who, from being
originally the all-powerful deity, was relegated by Brahminism
to the chief place among the minor gods--from being the god
of light and air he came to be the god of music. His retinue
consisted of the _gandharvas_, and _apsaras_, or celestial
musicians and nymphs, who sang magic songs. After the rise and
downfall of Buddhism in India the term _raga_ degenerated to
a name for a merely improvised chant to which no occult power
was ascribed.

The principal characteristics in modern Hindu music are a
seemingly instinctive sense of harmony; and although the actual
chords are absent, the melodic formation of the songs plainly
indicates a feeling for modern harmony, and even form. The
actual scale resembles our European scale of twelve semitones
(twenty-two _s'rutis_, quarter-tones), but the modal development
of these sounds has been extraordinary. Now a "mode" is the