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,
it was stolen by the latter and sold to Flechter.
It appeared that Eller had at once brought suit against Flechter for the
possession of the instrument, which suit, he asserted, he was still
pressing in the courts, and he now declared that the violin was in
exactly the same condition in every respect as when produced in the
police court, although it had been changed in some respects since it had
been stolen. It had originally been made of baked wood by one Dedier
Nicholas (an instrument maker of the first half of the nineteenth
century), and stamped with the maker's name, but this inscription was
now covered by a Stradivarius label.
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