Well, Nancy Fratti (aka 'Ms Music Box' to some of us) will probably get a
smile out of this story, and I'll bet it's happened to her too, with all
the boxes that have passed through her shop.

Last year at the Union, Illinois, phonograph swap meet, I was torn between
two cylinder boxes: one with 8 tunes and 6 bells, and another with 6
tunes, 7 bells, and a much finer comb and exquisite musical arrangements.
I finally chose the second box, although the bells didn't sound right --
its music was gorgeous with the bells turned off.  It's a L'Epee',
according to the odd ratchet pawl and other design details.

After getting it home, it became clear that some previous owner had
removed the bells for cleaning or whatever, and then came the
enlightening moment known in Greek as "Oh, Skatta!!"  He'd forgotten to
mark the bells, and they were now all out of order!

I went thru several permutations to get the 7 bells to fit all the tunes.
I tried figuring out the chord changes (a la folk guitarist) and
matrixing the bell notes with the chords.  Still not satisfied.  Finally,
I realized that one gallop tune's introduction did a so-fa-mi-re-do tune
on both the comb and the bells, so that was the Rosetta Stone that got
five out of seven.  The other two were easy.

Not so easy was re-bending the bell hammer wires -- they had been
adjusted to the sizes of the misplaced bells.

Curiously, the proper bell order was not the most esthetic looking, but
pretty much increasing pitch and decreasing size from left to right.  The
previous owner had assembled them in a very pleasing, symmetric pattern
of large and small.  Since the roller-bar system beneath the bedplate
allows complete freedom in assigning cylinder pins to bells, I'm
surprised the French didn't balance the sizes.

Anyway, seems pretty funny now -- but a little felt-tip pen marking on
the underside of each bell will keep the laugh from being on you!

Mike Knudsen